


The Oblivious Ones

by diamonddaydream



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Australia, Canada, Character Development, Courtroom Drama, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, Eventual Fluff, F/M, Fake Marriage, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Family, Getting Together, Happy Ending, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Implied Sexual Content, Kissing, Memory Charms, Mental Health Issues, Mutual Pining, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Post-Hogwarts, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Recovery, Romance, Romantic Draco Malfoy, Science, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Spells & Enchantments, St Mungo's Hospital, True Love, Weddings, Well-Written, World Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2020-10-17 06:02:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 30
Words: 76,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20616179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diamonddaydream/pseuds/diamonddaydream
Summary: A Dramione fake marriage story. Desperate to treat the post-traumatic stress disorder triggered by charming her parents' memories, Hermione Granger checks out of her Weasley wedding plans to check herself into St. Mungo's Hospital's psychiatric ward. There she encounters forensic inmate, Draco Malfoy, who is about to be released back into society, joining her on a journey to bring back her parents, taking them from enemies to family. Complete, not too much angst, fluffy enough, HEA. NOTE: Sequel "Always Something" is now complete.





	1. One

“Ronald, please.” Hermione Granger was tugging on the long chrome handle to let herself out of the muggle car. “There’s no need for you to check me in.”

Ron Weasley was slower operating the door on his side of the car. The thing was made of a long, heavy rectangle with a sharp metal corner that lodged itself in the turf beside where he’d parked, on the wrong side of the long, curved lane in front of St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries. The car door sank deeper into the ground as he tried to force it closed, and all the while she was walking farther away. This car--he never would have taken it if there was any way to talk while apparating. And they still needed to talk. He cursed the door shut and chased her toward the hospital doors.

“There is all kinds of need,” he said. “You are sick. And I’m responsible for you.”

She almost laughed. “Romantic.”

“Well, if you had a broken leg I wouldn’t ship you off to the hospital on your own. If you had some kind of pox--”

“Yes, yes,” she said. “You are a darling. You’ve done nothing wrong.”

He caught her hand, gripping hard, the diamond he’d had set in a gold ring for her cutting into the undersides of his fingers. Ridiculous thing--this ring she wanted, demanded, before she’d say yes to a wedding date. It was made to her specifications, a copy of the ring her father had given her mother. The original had been made before she was born, before her parents knew she would exist. He didn’t complain as the stone cut into him, and he didn’t let go of her either, which was sweet enough to stop her walking.

She turned to face him on the paving stones outside the hospital, kissed his pale freckled cheek, dewy with the morning fog. “I want a little time,” she said. “A little time on my own, somewhere quiet and safe, under the care of professionals. A little time to see what’s left of me when the plaster that is your family is peeled back from my war wounds.”

He closed his eyes, tipped his head back, saying it all again. “They’re your family too. This June, after the wedding, we’ll have the parchment to prove it. But it’s just a formality. You belong to all of us, always, already.”

He didn’t know why she laughed at that. He went on. “And I know they can never replace the family you had before, not your parents. I know. But I--forgive me if I’m having trouble understanding what any of that’s got to do with--this.” He waved an arm toward the stone porticoes and balustrades of the hospital.

Another kiss, on his opposite cheek. “I know,” she said, impressed and surprised at her power to sound so conciliatory as she told him again, “Thank you. Thank you for trusting me to know I need to try this. Even if it doesn’t make me better, I need to know that I tried everything--I tried everything I could to properly heal from losing my parents. The nightmares, the panic attacks, the constant pain. I can’t take it. And though I adore your parents and they’ve been so good to me, I can’t just keep all of this bandaged out of sight just to keep it from upsetting everyone else. I need to know what me looks like without us.”

His arms were around her neck, mashing her face into his shoulder, pressing his mouth against her hair, her eyelashes into the knit of his muffler.

She turned her head so she could speak. “It's only six weeks.”

He nodded against the crown of her head. “Right. At least let me walk you inside.”

The admission papers were signed and a beaded bracelet spelling out her name was clasped around her wrist. It would serve as her identification while she stayed here: G-R-A-N-G-E-R. 

“We do recommend that personal valuables be stored in our safe and not kept in patient rooms,” the clerk explained. “Do you have any valuables you wish to leave here? Money? Jewelry?”

Ron looked away as she wrenched the awful diamond ring from her finger and closed it inside a manila envelope.

They followed a hospital porter upstairs, to the topmost floor, level seven. The staircase ended in the middle of a long narrow hall. The porter turned right, toward the west where a door propped open by a potted plant led to St. Mungo’s psychiatric ward, white light from the foggy morning outside falling through the skylights in the high ceiling. The corridor to the left was dark, barred by a door reinforced with steel in spite of being charmed shut. There was one small window in the closed door, and one word written on it in straight black letters: “Forensics.”

“Oi,” Ron called to the porter, pointing at the locked door. “What’s all this then?”

The porter shrugged. “It’s what it says.”

“No.” He shook his head. “No, no, no. I bring my fiancee here, spell-shocked from the war, trusting in the reputation of this hospital, just to find she’ll be bunked next door to the very same deranged war criminals who forced her to--”

“Ronald, please--”

“Honestly, what in the hell?”

Hermione crossed her arms. “You see? Do you see yourself, Ronald? This is why I wanted to take leave of you outside.”

The porter was waving his hands, talking over both of them. “No problem. No entry. No exit.”

Ron gripped Hermione’s hand. “You’re not staying here, not down the hall from Little Azkaban.”

She tugged at her hand. “They’re just people. And they’re not evil. They’re sick.”

“Why can’t they be both?” He had his hands on her arm, pulling her forward as she leaned back.

But in this place, she wasn’t his. Hermione was a patient of the institution and the porter hired to keep her safe was squaring his shoulders, hovering a meaty hand over Ron’s wrist. “Sir, you need to let the lady alone.”

Their hands fell apart, as if hexed. “It’s okay,” she whispered, closing her arms around his waist. “Go.”

\---

St. Mungo’s psychiatric ward was well-managed, quiet. The light in its rooms and corridors was dull white, like the hospital-issued pajamas Hermione and the rest of the in-patients wore all day. Knitted slippers from the Burrow arrived every weekend, twisted yarn in jewel tones, fancy Belgian stitches, like more engagement baubles from Ron's doting, well-meaning family. Molly Weasley was sharper than the rest of them, like a real mother, but not at all like a real mother. She was nervous, hovering as best she could from a distance. Every time a new pair of slippers arrived, Hermione took them to the quarter of the common room where the catatonia patients sat in their wheelchairs. She peeled back their institutional paper booties, and replaced them with lush new knitting, as if they were captive House Elves.

"Go," she would whisper to them as she knelt over their feet. "Be free."

The noisiest part of every day was the session with Dr. Berlant, when Hermione and the rest of the post-traumatic stress patients were gathered together in a common room for group therapy. Every one of them had suffered horribly during the war. She didn’t know how closely they followed the tabloids during those years, but she thought it best not to use her real name on the unit with anyone but Dr. Berlant, in private. During therapy, she used her middle name. She was poor. lovely little Jean.

The day she found the courage to speak up in the group and recount her last moments at home with her parents, Dr. Berlant could not help but whistle. “A custom modified obliviate charm? Jean, do you mean to say you cast an effective modified obliviate spell, on two grown adults simultaneously, unassisted, self-taught as a teenager? Are you certain?”

The red-haired cabbie who witnessed a catastrophic Knight Bus crash laughed. “Naw! For that you’d have to be like that one--that--what do they call her--with Potter--that brightest witch of her age.”

“What happened to that girl?” the one-armed woman beside him mused. “Off having babies, yeah? Happily ever after, yeah?”

“Oh, she didn’t survive,” said the bald man who’d been the first to arrive on the scene of a mass muggle murder on his way home from the shop. “She was a casualty at Hogwarts, with the Weasley boy she was engaged to. Tragic. It was in all the papers, you know.”

"Weasley? No, he runs the joke shop now, on Diagon Alley."

"That's his brother."

Dr. Berlant coughed. “Well, I’m sure none of us knows for sure. All the rumors and whatnot. Jean?” Her eyes bulged at Hermione across the sharing circle, signaling that she was about to throw open an escape hatch from this unfortunate conversation. “Jean, I’ve just remembered something. Do you think you could scamper off and find Nurse Whalen and offer her a hand? I had her working on something special this afternoon and your help would be just the thing.”

Nurse Whalen was all confusion when Hermione presented herself at the nursing station as assigned to help. “Special project?” She flipped through her notes, frowning. ‘Maybe it’s--no, she can’t mean that.” She beat her quill against the desk, thinking hard before dropping it to take up a ring of keys. She shrugged as she led Hermione down the hall toward the exit, muttering as they went. “Well, doctor’s orders are doctor’s orders…”

As they moved down the corridor, Nurse Whalen explained. “There are two forensics patients set for release at the end of the month. We find it’s no good just turning them loose. Shock to the system. It’s better to ease them back into normal society with a little conversation with a volunteer from the community.” She stopped in the middle of the hallway, looked Hermione over from her head to her feet, took her by the wrist and read the name on her bracelet one more time, covering the G-R with her thumb so it simply spelled “A-N-G-E-R.”

“Jean, my dear, if it was anyone but you, I’d say Dr. Berlant was out of her mind.” She dropped Hermione’s wrist and they were walking again. “But I know you are no ordinary witch. I have seen your patient file and know what you are called outside of this place. But still…”

They had left the unit and now stood at the top of the staircase, in view of the steel door, the entrance to the forensics unit. For the first time in their walk, Nurse Whalen looked up. “Hermione Granger, are you alright? You don’t have to come. You don’t have to go with me through this door. Heaven knows you owe neither Berlant nor these inmates anything.”

Hermione fingered her bracelet. She had come here to pull off a plaster, to rip it off--hair, skin, scab, all of it. It was going to hurt. It had to hurt. She nodded. “Yes, let’s go.”

Keys rattled and banged and they were inside. The air smelled like bleach--like something filthy that could not quite be magicked away had been doused in caustic chemicals instead. Nurse Whalen leaned against the high desk of the forensics’s charge nurse. “We’re here for garden rehab with the upcoming releases.”

The forensics Nurse startled at the sight of Hermione’s face peering over Nurse Whalen’s shoulder.

“It’s some new thing Berlant is trying,” Nurse Whalen said, as if it explained anything.

“Honestly.” The nurse shook her head. “Well, we’d better not match up your delicate patient here with our big one. Could be trouble. No, but we do have a decent match for her.” She pressed a button and spoke into a speaker. “Brutus, bring out the wraith.”

“It’s not a wraith,” Nurse Whalen was quick to tell Hermione as they waited for her forensics match. “No, Jean, it’s just a man, young like yourself. The project requires you to do nothing more than chat with him as you stroll around our gated back garden--with a porter along for your protection, of course. All we're looking for is a few minutes of small-talk with an inmate--er, patient. And if it all goes wrong, the porter gets to scuffle and,” she pantomimed a flick of a wand, “Berlant ends up demoted back to the dispensary. You, on the other hand, have nothing to lose.”

The forensics corridor was not lit with skylights but with yellow light bulbs in wire cages. Beneath one of the bulbs, a door opened. A porter came out first, burly and slow, and behind him came the wraith. From a distance he looked like an old man--white-haired and thin, sparsely whiskered. It was his gait that gave him away as a young person, a force to his movements that was stifled but still vital. Hermione squinted at him, his features resolving as he stepped closer.

No, no, this was not right. This was not a match at all.

He wasn’t looking at her, leaving her in his peripheral vision, like the rest of staff that was all but faceless to him, like more potted plants. He was standing almost right in front of her when he looked at her face, when he saw her, when he heard a voice telling her his name.

“Draco Malfoy.”


	2. Two

Dr. Berlant was furious. What she'd meant to offer Hermione as an escape hatch from the disastrous group therapy session had turned out to be a portal to another disaster. What had Whalen been thinking, taking Hermione Granger to the forensic psychiatric unit full of tender Death Eaters who couldn't be held criminally responsible for their crimes? And why didn't the brightest witch of her age understand that the line about helping at the nursing station was a generous sham, a graceful exit, and just go back to her room?

Whalen wasn't bothered at all. "It was fine. Turned out to be nothing but some reminiscing about school in the garden, far as anyone can tell. And it was all your idea anyways."

"Draco Malfoy," the forensics nurse had read from his chart before he left the unit with Hermione and the porter. "This is Jean, a volunteer, to put you in the mood for talking to people once you leave us."

He stood on the bleach-stained marble floor of the forensic psychiatry unit of St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, looking at the woman introduced to him as Jean. It wasn't right. She needed to be called something else. He knew the face, the stance. But the wrong name was keeping the right one hidden. There was more too—or less. Wherever he knew this woman's face from, what had once animated it, what he remembered best about her, was gone.

Jean nodded at him.

The forensics nurse handed a key to the porter. "Back in half an hour," she said. "And try to get him to eat something."

Draco Malfoy, Hermione Granger, and the porter who would make sure they didn't hurt each other walked down the staircase in silence on their soft-soled shoes. They didn't take the same route she'd traveled with Ron on the day she was admitted. They walked instead to the back of the hospital, and out under the white sky. Malfoy stood barely over the threshold of the door, contemplating everything in the square, green lot, contemplating nothing.

Brutus, the porter, sat down on a bench, leaned against the stone of the hospital foundation, crossed his arms, and - unconcerned about the wraith - began to doze.

Hermione's assignment was to talk to him. She began with, "You don't remember."

"No, I do," he answered, not looking at her. "I remember much more of it than anyone knows. The name they called you upstairs. It's not right."

"Hermione Granger," she said, as if it was a challenge.

At the name, he looked into her face. They stood in the gloom of the garden, considering each other. She looked much the same as when he'd last seen her, in a courtroom. He on the other hand, was much changed. He was thin, so thin. His hair had grown long, waving in the humidity, white. His beard had grown too, but it was thin and wispy, darker than the hair of his head, making his face like the delicate bark of a birch tree covered in grey lichen.

She swallowed. "They said you should eat."

"We didn't get on," he answered. "Me and you. And it wasn't just childish Hogwarts house rivalries. It wasn't even the war. I had a filthy name for you."

There was nothing to do but ignore it. "I didn't know they were pairing me up with you this afternoon," she said. "I didn't know you were here."

"Where else?" he said. "Underage. I was underage when it all happened—child soldier. No prison for me, just this hospital. Two weeks and I leave, back to - whatever. Volunteering though—aren't you an angel."

His demeanor was odd. He didn't earnestly believe she was an angel, but he didn't seem quite sarcastic about it either. Something had altered him, affected him, perhaps enchanted him. The Draco Malfoy she knew was miles away. But she remembered him, she disliked him all the same.

"I am not your angel," she said, almost snapping. "Foremost, I am here as an in-patient. A psychiatric patient. Post-traumatic stress disorder is—is what my parents would have called it."

He twitched, interested. "Did I give it to you?"

She did snap this time. "No. You have given me nothing. I, on the other hand, am going to get you a sandwich."

She rapped on the bench to wake Brutus and went back into the hospital. Berlant was either the best psychiatrist in the world or the worst. Was sending her to see Draco Malfoy some kind of radical exposure therapy? Was seeing someone from the house of Malfoy, the house of Lestrange, the house of Black reduced to "the wraith" part of her treatment? She would trust her doctor, and instead of bolting up seven flights of steps to throw herself onto her bed, Hermione went to the kitchen to get a cucumber sandwich and a bottle of apple juice to bring to Malfoy.

"Eat it," she told him when she was back. "You look shocking. I had no idea you could be so thin. Your skull is coming through your forehead."

He may no reply but to finger the ridge behind his eyebrows.

She pursed her lips as she unwrapped the food. "Here," she said, holding half of the sandwich toward his hand. "Malfoy?" she prodded, louder now, but he hadn't stopped tapping at the bones in his face.

"Oh, for goodness sake, Malfoy." With one hand, she took his wrist between her fingers. With the other, she forced the sandwich into his palm. "We've never been inclined to make polite conversation, so just eat. It will pass the time."

He pulled the slices of white bread apart, raised one to his nose. "Have you been here all this time? At the hospital? Two years since we were all rounded up. We're nothing like under-aged anymore."

She scoffed. "No. I am not a criminal. I've just arrived here, for a six week treatment. Processing loss is a long—um, process."

He tossed a cucumber slice into the grass. "They don't call me a criminal here either. That's the point."

She twisted the top off the bottle of apple juice and pushed it along the bench toward him.

"They read the newspaper to us sometimes. The bits that don't matter," he began as he tore the bread apart, throwing bits of it into the air as if he was feeding a flock of birds. "I think they said Potter was engaged."

"No."

"Right, not Potter. It was—ginger—the Weasley."

She sighed. "Yes."

He frowned at the butter coating his fingertips. "Whichever it is, it must be you on the other end, yeah?"

"Yes. Yes," she said. "I am the future Mrs. Weasley, and this is my last stop before my wedding in June. I'm not getting married just to ruin it with a bunch of traumatic baggage."

"You're not getting married?" In the fresh air, he was more lucid, better oriented to the social aspect of his surroundings, acting on them, odd little manipulations, disorienting her. Maybe he was absorbing nutrients, energy from the sandwich she'd brought him through his fingertips.

"I am getting married," she corrected.

"Well, congratulations then." There was no bitterness in it. There was nothing in it.

"At least drink the juice."

"You hit me," he said, in the same neutral tone he'd said everything. "When we were kids, you hit me."

She nodded. "That was a long time ago."

"Are you sorry?"

"Are you?"

His hand closed around the bottle of juice. "I'm exploited. And even after all this time, still exploited, and I don't know how to make it stop."

She felt it then, behind her sternum, deep inside. What he said was familiar somehow. It was something she had never said, never thought. But it might be true—it might be true of her.

Dr Berlant was on to something. "Will we be here again tomorrow?" Malfoy asked as Brutus turned off the alarm on his timer and rose to take them back upstairs. Hermione stood up with him, Malfoy actually looking at her as she moved. A pigeon had landed in the wet grass to peck at the torn bread.

"Sure, Malfoy. Doctor's orders."


	3. Three

In truth, she didn't care if he ate or not. Still, every afternoon, she came to the back garden with something edible for him to tear to shreds, delicately, deliberately. He was like an emaciated raccoon, nimble fingers and deep shadows around his eyes, picking at his food as she sat on the bench between him and sleepy Brutus. Mangled snacks gave their time together a focus other than conversation. When they did talk, they weren't hostile and vulgar, as they used to be at school. Instead, their talk was strange, fascinating to her in its oddness, its detachment from the emotional context of their history.

"You really remember, Malfoy?" she asked him once. "You remember the days before the hospital?"

"Everything," he answered. "I remember it all - all of it but what it must have felt like."

Today her offering was something special, nothing taken from the hospital dining hall but something owled from the Burrow that morning, still warm from the Weasley family kitchen when it arrived at her window. It was a thick slice of sponge cake full of gumdrops which Malfoy was now pinching between his fingers, one by one, setting them down on the bench in a straight line inching its way toward Hermione's leg.

"The gooey half," he said, "is your half."

She had to laugh, like a cough, just once. "This is not what I envisioned when I invited you to share."

"This is from your family?"

She smoothed her hair and dropped it behind her shoulders. "From the Weasleys? Yes. Just eat it."

"They love you?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Malfoy, what a thing to say."

"Why would anyone send baking this awful to someone they were supposed to care for? It's obscene."

She watched his fingers dropping cake crumbs into the grass too close to his feet for the pigeons to tiptoe over to eat them up. Melted gumdrops in purple, green, yellow. "Amethyst, emerald, topaz," he called them. Sticky jewels advancing toward her. But the thick patina on an orange one had cracked and burst, coating the tip of his index finger with gelatin and sugar when he touched it. He frowned at the stickiness, flicked his hand hard, but the sugar stayed stuck to his skin.

"What did you expect?" she asked, reaching into the pocket on the front of her smock for her wand to clean him up. He hadn't seen his own wand for two years, not since they took him in. It had been brand new then and, frankly, he hardly remembered it.

He growled at himself over his candy-coated fingers, and there, for the first time since their re-acquaintance, Hermione saw the real Draco Malfoy - Hogwarts Malfoy, Slytherin Malfoy, the Malfoy she and Ron and Harry had known. His lip curled back in disgust, eyes narrowed in anger. He was on his feet, scanning the yard for someplace to wipe his fingers clean.

She gripped her wand inside her pocket, waiting, experimenting, her compassion for the pallid psychiatric inmate curbed by his sudden resemblance to the glowering, towering true Malfoy. "Lick it off," she told him. "It's a sweet. It won't hurt you."

He flinched at the suggestion but raised his hand toward his face, wetting his lips.

"Yes, that's it," she laughed at him. "Pretend you're a nice cat. Just open your mouth and - "

He swore. "Sick," he said, holding his own wrist as if to restrain himself. "No. Help me, Granger."

"If you don't want to lick it, just wipe it on your smock," she said.

He looked down at his white hospital shirt, and when he looked up, the corner of his mouth was twitching - a sneer or a smile. "I'll wipe it on your smock, Granger."

"Don't be vile."

"On your hair, then."

"No!"

Brutus snorted in his sleep.

"Granger." Malfoy was lunging at her, reaching, fingers grazing her clothing. "Come here and - "

All at once he was on his knees, in the grass and cake crumbs, palms mashed against his temples, eyes closed tight, his sticky fingertips soiling his own hair.

Brutus bent to raise him to standing. "You've gone and tripped it again, have you Slim?" he asked an insensible, groaning Malfoy. Brutus nodded to the doorway. "Got to let it go. Jean, my dear, would mind letting us back in?"

\----------------

Up on the seventh floor, Hermione leaned against Nurse Whalen's desk. "About our project," she began. "With the wraith. Slim. Draco Malfoy. I don't know but I think I'm making him worse."

Nurse Whalen listened to the account of the gumdrop outburst in the garden, sniffing into her paperwork. "Not at all. It's progress," she said. "Definite progress."

Hermione didn't understand, shifted on her feet, waiting to hear more.

Whalen hummed. "It's a good spell," she observed. "I wonder about Dr. Berlant's professional judgment from time to time, but I never doubt her spells."

Hermione frowned. "Malfoy is enchanted?"

Whalen raised her head, blinking. "Of course. They're all enchanted across the hall. That's what forensic psychiatry means at St. Mungo's." Whalen beckoned Hermione closer. "Innocentia," she whispered. "He was given an array of mind-quieting spells to choose for his treatment, and that's what he picked. No patient ever picks it - too dangerous. And no normal doctor would ever risk it, even if they did. It's difficult but Berlant's execution of it was flawless. You saw for yourself. As soon as his emotions flared at you, the spell took him to his knees."

Hermione repeated the word to herself. Innocentia.

"You know, with your experience casting mind-altering spells - unfortunate though it may be - you've probably got the chops to be a fine psychiatrist yourself, Jean."

Hermione shook her head. "Innocentia, a healing enchantment where a mind is regressed to a state of childish submissiveness and openness," she recited. "A state of flexibility and - weakness."

They'd lobotomized him. That's what her muggle parents would have called it. Dr. Berlant and her staff had magically lobotomized Draco Malfoy. It was why he was hardly himself and when he started to become the old Draco she knew, the enchantment ripped him away from it.

"Hermione," Dr. Berlant was standing behind her now. She'd been listening, enjoying Whalen's compliments and watching Hermione in profile as a new picture of Draco Malfoy took shape in her mind. The doctor was answering as if she knew exactly what a lobotomy was, and what it meant in the non-magical world. Perhaps she did know. "Hermione, you need to understand it was done with Mr. Malfoy's consent. There's no darkness in the spell. It's temporary and reversible."

Hermione held back her signature tirade on the falseness of the dichotomy between dark and light magic as Dr. Berlant continued. "Innocentia does nothing but create a quiet place where patients like Mr. Malfoy can heal - something like this hospital unit of ours is for you, only it's on the inside of his head instead of the outside."

"But how," Hermione said past a lump in her throat, "how can he be released back into the community in a state like that? There's less than a week left for him here, isn't there? But he's still numb and starving. He's still gone."

"That's it exactly. We can't release him like this," Berlant continued. "We'll release him from the forensics unit but then he'll need to join us over here until we can be reasonably sure he can function without the Innocentia enchantment. But he needs to want to live without it. That's what seems to be lacking. We were already in the process of weaning him off of its influence, and frankly we were concerned when we saw how little the withdrawal was affecting him. Part of the success of disenchantment depends on his will, and his will has vanished. Or, it had seemed that way until today, in the garden with you."

Hermione scoffed. "That? That was nothing exceptional. That was just him, healthy as I've ever known him."

Berlant nodded. "Yes, healthy with you. That's the point. He needs a reference, something of his self as he was before his admission here. You see, another part of the trouble with Mr. Malfoy's rehabilitation has been the - er, unavailability of his family members, or anyone from his past, to lead him back. It's true that bringing you and Mr. Malfoy into contact was not something we planned, but it may be a very fortunate coincidence. Especially since, well, you're not thriving here either, Hermione. You're restless and glum. Not everyone heals best in a quiet place. Some of us heal only when we're working."

Whalen was shaking her head, chuckling softly. "Here we go."

Dr. Berlant ignored her. "So will you work with us, Hermione? As part of your rehab, will you work to help us get Draco Malfoy to let go of the excess of his Innocentia enchantment? Know that if it ever gets to be too much, you're free to end it in an instant."

Something flickered behind Hermione's sternum again, the familiar sensation she was feeling for only the second time since coming to St. Mungo's. It felt like potential, a goal, something new, something to grow toward. Perhaps it was inspiration, or more than that: hope.

Dr. Berlant might be right. External fixing was the same as internal healing for Hermione Granger. If she could fix something here, all alone without the shelter and safety of Ron and his family, something as broken as the wraith-ish remains of Draco Malfoy, it might be enough to launch her into her future, into her marriage, into her home.

\-------------------

Draco Malfoy was released from the locked forensics ward of St. Mungo's Hospital just before noon on the first sunny day of that May. No one came to fetch him-no family, no friends. No one held him or wept for joy at being reunited with him when the steel door opened and set him free. Once, he had been truly loved, but those people were shut up somewhere else, or otherwise gone.

Only Brutus came along with him, walking farther ahead than usual, leading him across the landing where the hospital's main staircase terminated, past the potted plant, and into the regular psychiatric ward. Whalen rose from her seat in the nursing station to greet them, taking Malfoy by the hand to unlock the metal band from his wrist and fasten a beaded bracelet in its place.

In Malfoy's room, Brutus set his bag of personal belongings under the bed, nudging it beneath the hem of the coverlet with the toe of his shoe, as if to hide it. "Alright then, Slim," he said. "Let's head down the hall for lunchtime."

Malfoy blinked in the sun from the skylight in his high, white ceiling. "In a minute."

Brutus shrugged. "I'll take my leave of you here then," was all he said as he turned and left Malfoy alone-alone in the same room as his wand for the first time in two years. Malfoy remembered it should be back in his control now, remembered that they couldn't keep it from him once he'd been lawfully released. He pressed the large front pocket of his smock, patted the waistband along his back. No, it must be in his bag. There it was, another hawthorn, like in the beginning. It flexed slightly when he flicked it.

"Careful," someone said from the doorway. It was Hermione Granger, telling him, "Put it away and come to the dining room for lunch. Doctor's orders."

"It's a wand," he said.

"Yes, of course it is."

He raised it, pressed its end against his own throat, between the wispy, overgrown whiskers, to the pale skin underneath. "You've raised a wand against me before." His said, his tone flat. "You held it right here. Why? What were you going to do?"

She remembered. "We were kids, Malfoy. And you were awful."

"Awful. Awful what a wand can do, to a throat."

She rolled her eyes. "Malfoy, put it down. You'll hurt yourself."

"How?"

"It's best we don't find out. Set it down."

The wand stayed at his throat while his other hand felt the flesh up and down the length of his neck.

"Enough," she said, stepping into his room, closing her hand around his fingers still gripped to the wand. With just a little pressure, she guided the end of his wand toward the floor. "Behave, Malfoy. Don't make them take it away again. Don't do anything to make them think your mind-quieting spell is unbreakable."

"Innocentia," he said.

She nodded. "Yes."

"What?" he asked. "What would I feel for you, the girl who threatened me with a wand, who hit me, if it weren't for my Innocentia?" His left hand was moving across the short distance between them, thin fingers outstretched, touching her neck, tapping lightly at her throat, one fingertip pressing against her harder than the rest, like the end of a wand.

She tossed her head, dislodging his finger from its place against her neck. "What are you, a vampire now? Did you read 'Voyages with Vampires' while you were locked away? Huge Gilderoy Lockhart fan, are you? He still lives here, you know. Downstairs."

Malfoy said nothing but his eyes narrowed, not with anger, with interest. She kept talking. "I understand the appeal of the vampire fantasy. Muggles are crazy for it. Still, it's not worth giving up real food. Come on, Malfoy it's time for - "

With one more step, he was even closer to her, standing directly beneath the skylight, sunlight shining on his white hair, reflecting not off each of the strands, but through them. He had the look of a child as the pair of them stood there. Like a child, he stared at her, unembarrassed, eye to eye. This close, she sensed his height, well above hers. He was too thin, too bright in the sunlight, but had an ethereal quality about him which was verging on beautiful, even to her. In her throat, her pulse began to pound, beating faster as the pads of his fingers pressed themselves to it again.

She stepped away, breaking their contact. Was she scared, embarrassed, furious? And did he know?

Of course he didn't know, she told herself and she strode up the corridor, leaving him alone. All of his mumbling in that weird new Bela Lugosi cadence of his, the dilated grey-eyed staring, all the fiddling with her flesh like it was meat on his plate, the only thing she'd seen him look like he actually wanted to eat here in the hospital - clearly, the last thing he was thinking of through all of that was the feelings of anybody else.

He never did come out of his room that first day free of the forensic unit. For days the kitchen staff came in and out with trays of hot food. Dr. Berlant and her nurses went in, wands drawn, and lightened the Innocentia enchantment further than they ever had before. "Jean," the doctor called into the common room as she pulled Malfoy's door closed behind her staff one morning. "Can I have a word, Jean?"

In her office, with just Hermione as a witness, the doctor fell heavily into her chair. "No reaction at all," she said. "Just the same dull stare, stilted speech, flat affect. The Innocentia is barely there now, but he behaves as if the enchantment is fresh and new and still in full force. I swear he claws it back every time I try to take it away - casts it on himself from the inside now, hiding. I'm talking nonsense but I've never seen the likes of it. Of course the spell is supposed to have a lingering effect - a therapeutic effect. But this is well beyond."

The doctor was scared. Hermione recognized herself in the nervous pitch of her shoulders as she poured her tea. Berlant was a star medical spell-caster - successful, formidable, the youngest witch to ever be named head of a department at the most prestigious hospital in wizarding Britain. But Draco Malfoy's stalled recovery was marring all of that. It was sullying her reputation, her sense of herself as a capable healer, her sense of herself.

It was enough to prompt Hermione to return to the project and, in spite of the awkward exchange over wands and throats at lunchtime, to try something new with Draco Malfoy.

Balancing a tray on her arm, she rapped on the door to his room before letting herself inside. He was sitting on the floor, knees pulled up to his eyes, lounging in a ray of sunshine beaming through the skylight. At the sound of the door he opened his eyes.

"It was cold," was his opening non-sequitur.

She looked up, into the light warming him. Vampires aren't supposed to be able to abide sunbathing, but she wouldn't press that any further, not now. She focused on a successful conclusion to the Innocentia project, for herself, for Ron and the family, for Dr. Berlant, and yes, partly for Draco Malfoy's welfare as well.

"Up off the floor," she told him.

He didn't move to stand, just turned his profile to her, rubbed his ashy beard with one hand.

"Have it your way," she muttered to herself. The sunbeam on the floor was wide enough for both of them and she sat in it with him, setting the tray on the floor, lifting the white towel draped over the top of it, disturbing the dust motes floating in the sunlit air around them, tiny lights whirling, drawing Malfoy's attention if not his curiosity.

Hermione drew a deep breath, bracing herself, before she tugged lightly at the whiskers on his chin. "You need to come back, Draco Malfoy," she said. "People's reputations are at stake and what's more, you will never leave here unless you properly recover. And that means laying down this enchantment you're clinging to." She lifted a brush from the tray, swirling it in a pestle, lathering the paste inside it into white foam scented with peppermint.

Malfoy sniffed.

"Truly, you don't even look like yourself. Though I can tell you've been eating a little more. Good thing too. It fills out your face, makes this easier." He was still in profile so she began at his ear, dabbing the brush against the end of his jaw. "Keep still. This is how muggles shave..."

She nearly flinched as she spoke the trigger: "Muggle."

No reaction at all. She worked and waited.

Finally, he spoke. "How do you know that?"

She swallowed, spoke the second trigger. "My father is a Muggle, my mother too."

Malfoy fingered the shaving lather on his face.

"My father," she went on, "he would say that he was never himself in the morning until after shaving. Saturday, Sunday, every day, he shaves his face, just like this."

The brush moved in circles across Malfoy's jaw, cheek, crossing his chin to paint the other side like the first. He flinched as she lathered the skin of his upper lip, finally raising a hand to push the brush away.

"Leave it," she said again. "Be patient. It won't be there long. Now tip your head. No, backwards."

He didn't understand. His hand still covered hers as she held the brush, his other hand braced against the floor as he leaned away from her. She held her breath and tightened her focus on his face, resisting the urge to draw back. At this instant, she was engaged with the most invasive, most triggering, the most demanding thing she could think to do for Malfoy short of snogging him. It was close, tense, and she hardly breathed, watching his eyes, looking hard for tiny cracks to form in the glaze of his Innocentia.

"Tip your head backward," she said again. "Close your eyes and look up at the sun, as if you can see through your eyelids."

This he understood, baring his neck to her as she brushed it with suds. Hermione wet the razor in the basin of water she'd brought. Not a straight razor - nothing so dramatic - just a blue plastic muggle safety razor, like her father might still be using to shave every morning, in Australia, as Hermione was going to bed in St. Mungo's Hospital.

He hissed. "Ow."

"Sorry," she said. "Your beard's a bit long. Dad never let his whiskers get like this."

"I'm not your dad, Granger."

There it was. She laughed quietly. Pressing the razor against the underside of Malfoy's chin. "No. You are not my icky non-magical dad. Aren't you going to ask me where my dad is? Whether he survived the war? Whether he's locked up, like your father?"

He said nothing, but as she cleared the melting white foam from his throat, his flesh twitched.

"Look at that," she said, knowing he couldn't look. "You're not a vampire after all, Malfoy. Sorry, but your heart is clearly beating. I can see your pulse through your skin. What is that blood vessel, there in your neck - the jugular?"

"Carotid."

"Carotid, yes. I always muddle those two. Almost done now. Look straight at me, yeah?"

Malfoy lowered his head, his chin level. His face had changed and not just from shaving his whiskers. Lines were forming on his forehead. His teeth were clenched, tightening his jawline. The glaze over his eyes was hardly there.

"Malfoy?" she asked, almost cooing. "Are you alright? The Innocentia, is it hurting you?"

He gripped his knees with both his hands, his arms faintly quaking. "Finish," he said.

When all that was left to shave was his upper lip, she tried to show him how to hold his face so the skin was stretched safely taut. He didn't understand. He was agitated, swaying his head slightly from side to side. The project was working. She could see that. What she couldn't see was the line between loosening his grip on what was left of the Innocentia spell, and driving him into the limits of the spell, the emotional pitch where it would punish him, the way it had in the garden, with the gumdrops. At school, Draco Malfoy had been competent at potions. In those days, she had noticed things like that. He was the kind of critical student who could tell his carotid from his jugular. Potions was the most experimental of the magical sciences they studied. And, she reasoned, the real Malfoy behind the psychiatric spell would want to push this, to see the experiment brought to its conclusion.

Hermione pushed. She extended her forefinger, connecting with the bow of his upper lip, drawing it down, holding it taut herself. Malfoy shut his eyes, breath hot against her hand.

He spoke through the sides of his mouth. "Doesn't hurt."

"Did you know," she began again, "that my Muggle father and mother had their memories wiped clean of me with a modified Obliviate spell, before they were sent far away? I vanished right out of existence, far as they're concerned. It was a mercy, the only way for them to survive the violence of those days. I haven't seen them since before the war. And, to their knowledge, they've never seen me." She held the razor below his nose, leaning into the final stroke. "It was a dark witch who took their only daughter away from them."

With the towel she had brought clasped in her hands, she waited a moment more as he shook and strained on the floor, not knowing she had finished. She tossed the towel over his head. "Wipe your face, Malfoy."

He clawed at the fabric, scrubbing it against his skin. "I can still smell it."

"Of course you can. It's lovely."

"I hear you," he panted. "Your parents - you sent them away yourself. You did it."

"You're right," she said, tearing the towel out of his hands. There was his face, clean, fragrant and a bit pink. "I am that dark witch."

He was on his feet, pacing in front of his bed, yanking his wet smock over his head, standing in the centre of the room half-dressed.

She hurled the towel at him again. "Look at me, Draco Malfoy."

He had caught the towel and slung it over his shoulders. "I can still hear you, Granger. You're pushing at the spell," he said. "You're with Berlant and the rest. You want me out."

"Yes."

"You're forcing me out of Innocentia so I'll have to go back to whatever there is out there. Don't think I can't tell. Don't think I don't know."

Ten minutes ago, he would have been right. But now, Hermione's visit to Malfoy's hospital room had nothing more to do him. She was on her knees in a shallow puddle of spilled shaving water, furious, grieving for her lost family, yelling. "Listen to me! Will someone listen to me?"

For the first time in two years, Malfoy remembered there were people outside of his field of vision. He didn't need an active Innocentia enchantment to limit his impulses and prompt him to take responsibility of his social environment anymore. With her razor, the water, her voice, heat and smell, and with his own memories, Hermione had pushed him past that and he could not go back. With just the clinical residue of the spell, he would control things himself, if he could figure out how.

Now Granger was making a terrible racket in his room. She really was a psychiatric patient -- a mess of one. He glanced at the closed door of his room. Someone would be coming to rescue her soon. And not Brutus, but something less friendly.

Hermione drew in a deep breath, ready at last to tell someone everything. "I know now," she began, "that if our life at school, at war - all of it - if it was ever written down, made into a book, I know who would write it. Do you know?"

Malfoy had turned his back to her and was pawing through a drawer, looking for a dry smock to put on before anyone could open the door - damage control.

"Answer me!" she howled at him.

"I don't know," he replied, his face still inside his shirt. "Who cares? You could write it yourself. Go ahead."

She slapped the wet floor, sending dirty spray into the air. He raised his arms against it. "No, not me!" she said "The writer would have to be a mother."

"Fine," he agreed.

"A mother," Hermione said, quieter now. "I can tell by the way every real hero in our story has been a mother: Harry's against the Dark Lord, Molly against Bellatrix, Tonks, and even your own mother, Malfoy. Every time someone really, truly needed saving it wasn't us, it wasn't some powerful headmaster or professor or minister. It was mothers. No one writes stories like that. Only another mother would write that way."

He looked up through the skylight as she spoke. His mother, who had lied to a monster to save just one life, his life - where was she now?

"To bring us to where we are right now, every mother in our story got to be a hero, except for mine," Hermione went on. "It was me who took that from her, without even asking. I didn't think she was strong enough. I didn't believe motherhood was strong enough - not for me and her. And for that, the author to this story, if there is one, sitting somewhere, crafting all of this whether she intends to or not, has punished me, marooned me between here and the Burrow. I am a perversion - my mother and me. I am twisted and wrong and I can't - " Her voice broke and she began to sob.

It was loud and shrill, not a pretty cry. It was a cry of illness and grief. His eyes flicked toward the door, his ears strained to hear footfalls in the hallway outside. He was shushing her but she ignored him completely.

"Because of what I am, I can't set foot in the next chapter of my own life," she said, bowing toward the floor, her hair falling into the spilled shaving water.

"Hey, quiet," he tried again. Still not used to reaching for his wand to fix everything, he swooped toward the ground with the towel in his hands. If he couldn't shut her up, the least he could do was clean her up before anyone found them like this. He sopped up the puddle around her. He had no idea what she was on about with this mother-writer line but he spoke to her anyway, in a low voice far calmer than he felt. "Oh, you're alright, Granger. Come on, let's get up off the floor before the doctor breaks the door down. Up out of all this manky water, at any rate. Look, you're filthy."

She wailed louder than ever, angry again, shoving at him, speaking the last, worst trigger, the final test unfolding with ugly spontaneity. "Filthy Mudblood, yeah? Is that still it, Malfoy?"

He could hear footsteps along the corridor for real now. Someone was coming. Desperate, Malfoy bent his arm around Hermione's neck, pulling her face into his shoulder, muffling her sobs against the front of his clean shirt.

"Quiet," he whispered into her ear. His breath was hot, blown against her face now. His mouth touched her skin as he form the words, and in a wave of lingering peppermint told her, "Innocentia survivors do not use that word."


	4. Four

There hadn't been much water, just a small shaving basin's worth, but Hermione Granger was drenched, flat on her back on the stone floor of Draco Malfoy's hospital room.

"Get OFF me, Malfoy."

She shoved hard at his shoulders and he sat up quickly, eyeing the doorknob as it rattled and sparked. Hermione wiped her cheeks, clearing away tears that didn't feel like her own anymore and smoothing her skin, effacing the sense of the rough front of his hospital shirt. Her face had been pressed against it as they'd scuffled, tipped off balance, and fell from kneeling to lying on the wet floor, his torso on top of hers.

The doorknob was now glowing green with the strained alohomora of someone breaking in from the outside. Nurse Whalen's voice came calling through the wood. "Jean? Are you in there? Don't tell me she's still in there. Jean dear, is everything all right?"

Hermione swatted Malfoy's arm. "Open it."

He was still feeling for his wand when Whalen let herself in. There was surprise, alarm, and then elation as she took in the scene. The wraith was beardless though rather raw-faced from a terrible shave, and the ghostliness in his eyes had been replaced by embarrassment. Innocentia and embarrassment cannot coexist. Whalen knew, and she spun in a circle and ran for Dr. Berlant.

As the room cleared, Hermione got to her feet. "Keep the shaving gear," she said, hurrying for the door as fast as she dared without slipping in the water again.

"Wait."

"For what, Malfoy? For me to cut your hair?"

He was indeed standing next to the open door fingering the ends of his hair, noticing, at last, that it had grown all the way to his shoulders since he had last been presented to a barber. He was still transfixed with it as Hermione darted past him, pulling the door closed behind her.

\-------------------------------

"My darling Hermione, if you weren't my patient I would hug you," Dr. Berlant told her later, in her office after Hermione had got clean and dry. "Excellent results with Mr. Malfoy today, excellent. Of course, we'll hold him for at least another week, until he's stable and we can sort out a transition situation for him. The last photo I saw of Malfoy Manor it was boarded up, right after the trials. It will take time, but in every respect he now seems to be making a proper rehabilitation."

Hermione nodded and laughed along with Berlant - at least, she tried her best.

Dr. Berlant frowned. "Something's happened."

Hermione raised both her hands in front of herself, like a shield. "No, no, it's nothing."

The doctor sat up straight in her chair. "Did he meddle with you?"

"Who?"

"Mr. Malfoy," Dr. Berlant said, "did he - do anything to you? You seem different than when I saw you before you met with him this afternoon. As your doctor, I need to know why."

Hermione sighed. "It's just that I got to rambling about my parents. I planned it all out before I went to Malfoy's room and didn't think it would affect me, but it did. It led to all sorts of ideas I've never been able to string together before. And I said them all out loud in a great rush that I can't take back."

Dr. Berlant nodded. "Yes, well it's good to feel your feelings. Part of the wellness journey you're on."

"But I said it all in front of him," Hermione continued. "I wasn't working with you, like a healthy patient. I was yelling at him. It was humiliating and awful. I lost control. I made a mess."

Doctor Berlant scoffed, possibly at the term "healthy patient." She assured Hermione that a mess in the psychiatric ward was fine. "Muggles call that kind of outburst cathartic," the doctor mused. "It has no medical value, but it doesn't hurt either."

"I cried in there," Hermione said. "Sobbed."

Dr. Berlant's straight posture pitched forward, leaning toward Hermione. "That's new for you. You've finally cried over the loss of your parents? Not just 'eyes swimming' but openly cried?"

"Yes. Cried on Draco Malfoy's shoulder while he tried to keep anyone from hearing me."

"He comforted you?"

"I wouldn't say that. It was more like we launched our tragedies together into a large hadron supercollider and blew each other to bits."

"A wot?"

Hermione shook her head. "Sorry, my father subscribed to muggle science magazines. It's a gigantic machine that uses energy and electromagnets to blast elements together and create new materials no one's ever seen on earth before - or something like that. Dinner conversation at our house was fairly demanding."

"Supercollider - this is the muggle answer to philosopher's stones?"

Hermione shrugged.

Dr. Berlant leaned back in her chair. "When you speak to Malfoy, you're speaking to your past. And it provokes the question of what kinds of new elements you discovered in Draco Malfoy's room."

Maybe the doctor didn't mean for the question to sound like an innuendo. Whether she did or not, Hermione did not blush. Instead, she deflected, tearing into her theory - the private one jarred out of her, spoken aloud for the first time to Malfoy that afternoon - about the mother-author crafting their story, omnipotent and unseen, making an example out of Hermione for her lack of faith in motherhood which drove her to send her own mother away.

"And I'm not the only one who lost her," Hermione explained. "When I changed my parents from the Grangers to the Wilkins, everyone who loved them lost them - their parents, my aunts and uncles - everyone. I changed the names on their dental degrees. I left them their living, but I took their lives. And now I can't properly love what's left of my own life."

Dr. Berlant spotted a breakthrough. She ignored the the nonsense about Hermione's life being a book and pounced on it. "I hear you saying you can't properly love what you have. Who do you mean by that?"

Hermione twitched. "I didn't say that."

"You did."

"No, my new family - the Weasleys - they're everything to me. I adore them. They are my own heart now, that's the problem - "

"But you came here to be on your own."

"Yes, for medical treatment. I'd never abandon the Weasleys for good."

The doctor slumped, visibly relieved. Engagements had a way of coming apart at St. Mungo's. She'd seen it before and wanted no part of breaking up two thirds of the golden trio, innuendos or not. "Perhaps we should invite some of the Weasleys here for a visit, yeah? You're over halfway finished your stay. It would be completely appropriate."

Hermione nodded. "All right then."

She had stood up to leave when the doctor began to speak again. "Hermione, no one is in charge of your life but you. No one else is writing your story. You are independent and capable in ways few witches your age will ever be. You've made hard choices but those should just go to show you that no one can choose who you make your family but you. Try to think of it that way."

"Yes, doctor."

"Don't," Berlant called out as Hermione's hand grasped the doorknob. "Don't talk to anyone about your - metaphor - about the all-powerful author."

"It's not just a metaphor - "

"Hermione," the doctor interrupted. "You and I will discuss it tomorrow. But do not mention it to anyone else. Write a sweet letter to your fiance and go to sleep."

But she didn't go to sleep. According to the all-powerful writer-mother, she was meant to rest on and on in a happily ever after. She was meant to peak at seventeen and then make children for a sequel with the man who'd been assigned to her when she was eleven. They would work to stuff a vault at Gringotts, and retell their stories in the past tense. Perhaps this was why she resisted, walking, not resting, not reading, not writing love notes to Ronald Weasley, inviting him to come and fold her back into someone else's book. She walked past all the closed doors of the other patients, past Whalen's nighttime replacement toiling over parchments. At the top of the staircase between the regular and the forensic psychiatry wards, she stopped.

Malfoy was there, sitting on the top stair, looking up through the dome of glass over the rotunda at constellations spread out for him like a family portrait. She kept quiet, standing well behind him, looking at northern stars her parents could not see. How would the mother-author compose the next scene? And what would be the most spectacular way for her, for Hermione, to frustrate whatever the author intended? She took a deep breath, and in it, she smelled peppermint and wet stone.

For today, it was enough. And without a sound, she turned and went to bed.

\-----------------------

Ron sat in the common room of St. Mungo's psychiatric ward, nodding at the catatonics. "Morning, morning."

He had come as soon as the owl with the letter asking for him had arrived, apparating onto the grounds of St. Mungo's with his hair barely combed. He had that sleepy-redhead look that is easily mistaken for illness. Sure, he had arrived earlier than she'd asked for him but - where was she? It's not like there was anything here for her to do.

A stranger was striding across the common room now, her hand extended, calling his name. She did not introduce herself which meant, of course, that she must be the doctor here. Ron was polite but didn't manage to wait until the two of them were shut away in the doctor's office before blurting, "Where's Hermione? Is she alright?"

The doctor summoned a chair for him. "Do sit down, Mr. Weasley."

Ron's alarm grew as the doctor explained Hermione's theories about the all-powerful author.

"Is she off her head then?" he asked.

Dr. Berlant scoffed gently. "No, but she is dealing with enormous stress. That's why I wanted to meet with you before you see her. "

"Right, right," Ron rushed. "Stress. So if she tries to convince me about a writer controlling all of us, I don't make it worse by arguing over it. I am here," he said, as if speaking from a memorized script, "to offer support."

The doctor rotated her swiveling leather office chair a full 360 degrees. "Well, no," she began. "Chiefly, you are here to ground her in reality. Do oppose her delusions, just make sure to be kind. Firm but kind."

Ron cocked his head. "Oh. Well alright then. You're the doctor."

Mornings are hospital doctors' busiest times so she dismissed Ron quickly. There was no time to mention trivialities like an old rival from school being somewhere on the ward. Hermione was in the common room when Ron left Dr. Berlant's office. She hopped to her feet at the sight of him, rushing to throw her arms around his neck, dragging his face down to her level, pressing their cheeks together. Not all of the reasons for Ron and Hermione's connection were the punitive, overbearing reasonings of an overlord writer. There was also this their physical affinity for one another, the way they filled each other's arms so warmly and comfortably. She heard him inhale the scent of her hair, breathily describing the awful depths of his loneliness into her ear.

Above it, Hermione heard a thin, frail voice speaking from the ranks of patients lounging on sofas behind them. "Aw…."

Taking her hand, Ron stepped back. "Let's go for a turn around the garden."

On the green lawn outside St. Mungo's, after explaining the mother-writer to him in almost exactly the same terms Dr. Berlant had used, Ron and Hermione began to argue as soon as they broke physical contact with one another. "I'm sorry, Hermione, but the most important thing is that you stay grounded in reality," he said. "Which means don't go loony in here. Don't let it make things worse. Get well and come home. It's horrible without you."

"I do want to come home," she assured him. "But I'm not ready yet. And I may have to veer out of reality for a little while, just so I can see it properly, see if it's actually - real."

Ron was talking fast, in a higher pitch than usual as he said, "I completely agree, Hermione, that the fact that someone like you wants a life with someone like me makes no sense at all. No one knows that better than me. But please, tell me you feel there's something more to our years of loving each other besides the whim of some mythical, invisible author."

"Of course there is."

"Then why does it matter if that sort of creature is real? It won't change how we live, or how we feel."

"It matters because of my parents," she said.

Her parents: the great enders of arguments. Ron always crumbled in the face of a loss like Hermione's. Since the war ended, he'd been encouraging her to travel to Australia, find Wendell and Monika Wilkins, turn them back into the Grangers. He'd sat in the offices of a muggle travel agent and asked bizarre questions about Australian money and Muggle passports, ready at whatever moment she chose to go with her to find them. Her resistance was hard for him to understand.

"It wasn't a standard memory charm," she had explained to him, years ago. "It was a modified obliviate - the standard spell but with something new I invented myself, to make it limited and reversible, so they wouldn't end up like Lockhart. But there was never any way to test it. I can't be sure they can be brought back. And if I attempt the reversal and it fails, they're lost forever. But as long as I don't try, that possibility, that hope survives a little longer."

Ron didn't see the point in protecting a swishy idea like hope if it meant not actually getting to have her parents in their lives, but it wasn't up to him. "Schrodinger's parents," she called them, which made even less sense to him than any of it. In the garden at St. Mungo's now, he struggled to gather her many threads.

"I'm ready to find them," she said. "If the writer believes so much in mothers and families, maybe she will strengthen my memory spell, make it work the way she wants it to, and everything, with everyone, will go back to the way it would have been if there had been no war. She will let me undo what I did."

Ron snatched at her hand. "Good, yes. I'll start figuring out logistics to get us to Australia before the wedding. There isn't much time but someone's got to have a Britain to Australia portkey somewhere."

"Ron, no," she said. "I'm not letting the writer have it completely her own way."

He felt his face blanch, his stomach tighten around his breakfast.

"Ron," she said, "we won't be going together."


	5. Five

By the end of Ron's visit to St. Mungo's, they had agreed to nothing. He remained adamant that he and Hermione would travel to Australia and find the Wilkins together. "You're still sick," he reasoned. "If you had a broken leg, I wouldn't ship you off on a trip to Australia by yourself. If you had some kind of - "

"Pox, yes you are a darling, Ronald. And you are not coming with me."

It was Brutus who brought the conversation to an end, appearing on the lawn asking for Jean, reminding her that Dr. Berlant was expecting her for a session soon. Ron kissed her harder than he meant to and warned her to expect to see him again at suppertime the next day. She was rubbing a swelling lip as the air cracked with his disapparation.

Across the garden, unnoticed by Ron and Hermione, Draco Malfoy had come for some privacy of his own. Getting used to eating was more difficult than he expected. Without Innocentia, his need to eat was compelling but also rather harrowing - loud, wet, dirty, and perhaps something darker. He couldn't escape the need for dinner, but he could escape dinner companions, and he'd been taking whatever meals he could outside, alone. From where he sat on a bench in the garden, eating what the pigeons now considered far more than his share of a ham sandwich, Malfoy had spotted Weasley's hair.

In the more heated parts of their conversation, he could hear Ron's voice, not the words but the sound of it. Malfoy had hummed in recognition. So there goes Weasley, same as always. The pigeons had taken wing at the crack of Ron's disapparation. The jolt of anger Malfoy used to feel at the sight of Weasley was gone. Maybe it was the therapeutic trace of the Innocentia treatment, maybe it was an extension of his cool gratitude to Granger for pushing him out of the spell, maybe it was because he'd been out of his father's influence for two years, maybe it was the death of the dark lord himself, or maybe it was just growing up.

The best he could muster in bad-will toward Ron Weasley was to mutter as he watched Hermione and Brutus walking back into the hospital, "The future Mrs. Weasley? What is Granger thinking?"

Berlant called him into her office in the afternoon, when the medical potions most of the patients had taken with their lunches had them happy and sleepy, and the ward was quiet, so sunlit it hurt his eyes. It was a pleasant time of day she reserved for unpleasant tasks and it had long been Draco Malfoy's time-slot in her office. Without Innocentia, he could read her face, see the distaste for him which she had always had. He was coming to understand what it meant to be a Malfoy in post-war Britain.

"They're talking 'truth and reconciliation' for former Death Eaters," she explained. "You'll have noticed your arm, no doubt. The mark has been gone since before you were brought here. It wasn't that way last time, the first time we thought we'd won the war, when we all believed, wrongly, that the threat had passed. But this time - no mark, no You-know-who."

Even the sound of that non-name gave Malfoy the feeling of ice crystals shifting in the tissues of his heart.

"Whatever clemency the ministry offer them, it's going to take time to work all of the incarcerated Death Eaters through the system. Now that you're getting well, I assume you'll work to expedite your parents' release. Make moving, penitent speeches? A dashing yet sympathetic photo-spread in the Daily Prophet, perhaps?" She paused, reading his response to her needling verbal tests, watching him across her desk. And even though she didn't raise her hand, she seemed like someone holding her nose. "Why haven't you asked me, Mr. Malfoy?"

"Asked?"

"Yes, why didn't you come howling at me demanding to see your family the moment the Innocentia enchantment ran its course?"

"You mean, as soon as Granger broke it for you?"

"However you like it, Mr. Malfoy. Answer my question. Why have you shown no interest in your family? As your doctor, I need to know."

He leaned toward her. "As my doctor, I reckon you already know."

She leaned forward as well. "Tell me about your mother, Draco Malfoy."

He sat back, laughing, running his hands through his hair. "Thanks ever so much for all your hard work over the past two years, but I believe we've finished here. I'll spend tonight, if you please, and in the morning, I'll go. Right." He stood to leave.

The doctor matched his false, hostile politeness with her own, every bit as aggressive. "Rushing off? Well, we're in the process of assembling your transition team but if you'd rather not wait for them, that's certainly your prerogative. Smart of you, making a clean break from a place that was, in actuality, a prison for you, the site of such horrible degradation. Oh, but do take care to go quietly. Don't upset any of the other patients on the way out."

The slamming of the door cut her words short and left Malfoy standing alone in the corridor while the unit still napped. He leaned against the wall, breathing deeply, experiencing anger for the first time in ages. There was too much violence behind it, a great, awful crashing, and it tripped the lingering Innocentia in his brain, aching against his forehead. At the far end of the corridor a door opened, he turned in the opposite direction of the sound, moving pressed against the wall, getting away. But there were steps following him, getting quicker. He was fighting to outrun them, moving through the open doorway to leave the unit, slumping against the banister of the staircase. Now there was a gasp and a hand on his shirt, tugging him back, forcing him to sit down hard on the topmost stair.

"That's dramatic," a voice said. "Off to throw yourself down the stairs, Malfoy?"

It was Granger. With the traces of Innocentia flaring, he couldn't quite form a sneer. "What do you want? Why aren't you in there sleeping off your craziness with the rest of them?"

"I wish I could. But Dr. Berlant says I get well by keeping my mind active."

"And by running around like a house elf doing her job for her?"

"Shut up, Malfoy."

The pain in his head was abating. He straightened his back, dropped his hands from his temples. "Your doctor friend and I - we don't get on."

She scoffed. "Why am I not surprised? Well, learning to work together will be part of your recovery, I'm sure."

He shook his head. "Not a bit. I'm leaving tomorrow. Getting out before she hexes me with balding, or something, and then tries to act like it's all natural, even though my dad's never had anything but loads of hair."

Hermione laughed at so oddly specific a worry, and he turned to look at her when he heard the sound of it. "Not to worry, Malfoy. If that's your biggest worry for the future, rest easy. You are well on your way to Lucius Malfoy-level hair glory." With one finger, she flicked the ends of his hair, sending it springing into his face. He flinched at first, but the laughter was placating.

She kept talking. "I'll be leaving soon too."

"Wedding, yeah?"

She forced herself not to sigh in front of him, and explained her trip to Australia instead. He nodded at all the parts about Schrodinger's parents, the whims of the mother-author. Her delusions were already familiar to him and she was welcome to them, as far as he was concerned. It was when she told him that Ron wasn't coming with her that he finally broke in.

"Is that wise?" he asked. "Going right from St. Mungo's to traveling through a Muggle society you've never seen before?"

"I lived half of my life in Muggle society," she corrected him.

"That's just the British Muggle society, you daft thing. The rest of the world's not like here."

"Of course not, but at least they speak English in Australia."

"If your parents even ended up there. They left enchanted by a memory spell, not an Imperius curse. And why didn't you just send them to Canada? It's only a trans-Atlantic trip. Australia is the other side of absolutely everything."

"I was thinking of the weather."

"Fair enough, but what about the bugs?"

Yes, there was that too. Spiders and kangaroos were some of what used to come to Hermione's mind first when she thought of Australia - typical foreigner. She sat beside Malfoy, laughing softly to herself, sadly. Spiders - Ronald Weasley's nemesis. Maybe even as she was first sending her parents away, she already knew to arrange things to keep him from coming with her to retrieve them.

"Canada," she said, flicking her wand to bring a map of the globe to light in front of herself. "Look at that. Even on a Muggle airplane we could've made it to Canada's east coast from here in only seven hours."

"What?"

"That's not even a full day."

Malfoy shoved at her arm. "'We?' What's 'we'?"

There it was, the answer to the problem she'd been fussing over all day. She had revealed it before she was ready, but there it was. She covered her face with both of her hands, bowed her head into her knees, disappearing from him into her hair. "Do it, Hermione Jean Granger," she whispered to herself. "Do it."

"It's as you said, Malfoy. I need a traveling companion. And in the condition I'm in, I need someone I react to emotionally but who has no stake in my future. Someone who won't be hurt when he hears me ruminating endlessly over the trauma that brought me to this point. I need someone who doesn't even want my future to be any of their business."

There was a pause. "Granger, what are you on about?"

"You're not that dense," she said. "Stop playing at being stupid and just say you'll go with me. There are so many good reasons for you to be the one to come along."

He scoffed. "Yeah? Give me these reasons."

She rotated her posture toward him. "Well for one, you're clever enough."

"Though a complete and utter failure at every important task I've ever been given."

"Don't try that with me, Draco Malfoy. Tasks that came to you from a genocidal maniac looking for excuses to further punish your father and his loved ones don't count. Every time you failed, it was because you were purposely set up for self-destruction. It's hardly a fair measure of your abilities."

He waved it away. "Give me another one."

"You're unemployed. You may as well be abroad as anywhere else."

"More."

"You expect nothing from me at a time when I have nothing to give."

He frowned, but answered, "Well, that one's true."

"And," she said, "I've hardly slept since the day we broke your Innocentia enchantment. It didn't just change you, it changed me too. I talked about my parents, cried about my parents, and I talked about my sense of not being in control of my life. And when I think of that in terms of being written by an omniscient mother-author, it makes me want to defy her, and get back my own free will. So I ask myself, what I could do to disrupt her story-line. And now I think I know."

She stopped and drew a breath so deep he watched her shoulders rise and fall with it. Malfoy let Hermione speak the words though he knew what was coming.

"You have to come with me, Malfoy, for your own sake as well as mine. Think: if someone was writing our lives as a book, from the very first, before writing a word about the evil schemes of grownup Death Eaters, there was a little boy written as the bad guy. There was you. Wouldn't it infuriate our author friend if I were to make my escape with you? Wouldn't she scold us for romanticizing your badness? Tell us to stop? Wouldn't she?"

At the top of St. Mungo's rotunda, he blinked. The light outside was dimming. The stars would be out soon, looming overhead, a roll call of his lineage and everything he wanted to be free of - at least for awhile. Perhaps there was only one way out of the old hate.

He held out his hand. "Shake," he said.

"You don't have to try to hex me, Malfoy."

He snatched at her hand, speaking louder this time. "No, shake. Shake my hand, Granger. We're sealing an agreement."

She gripped his fingers in return. "Yes, agreed. We're leaving."

"Tomorrow. Yes."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for all the kudos and comments, everyone. Your kind words keep me motivated to keep investing some time writing the story every day in spite of being extremely busy with school.


	6. Six

What had he done?

Their final suppertime at St. Mungo's was over and Draco Malfoy was sitting on his bed, legs folded beneath himself, keeping clear of Hermione Granger who was crawling around underneath it.

"Normally, I take it upon myself to pack everything my traveling companions are going to need." Her voice came muffled from below the mattress. "But we don't have much to work with here in the hospital. I don't even have all of what I need, let alone you." Malfoy's few personal belongings were being slid out from under the bed and into the centre of the floor. The last thing to emerge was Hermione herself, dust in her hair and smeared on her white hospital clothes. She clapped her hands together. "Right. What do we have here?"

From the bundle of clothes and books and shiny things she drew out a long dark robe, heavy with hand-sewn pleats, crafted out of black linen embroidered in satin with snaking vines and calligraphic letter Ds and Ms. It was the clothing Malfoy had been wearing the day he was first admitted to the hospital. She flicked it like a dirty rug, raising a cloud of dust.

"Why so infernally fancy, Malfoy? Did you all get arrested at a wedding?"

"Close. We were at the courthouse, at the trials."

Of course. The rest of the clothing from under the bed was similar - a starched white shirt yellowed from storage, a dark silk monogrammed tie to match the robes. Hermione looked them over and let them drop back into a heap.

"No good?" he mused, lying back onto the pillow. "Well, if you start knitting right now, maybe you can have a jumper ready for me by morning."

She tossed a rolled pair of forest green socks at his head. "Knit it yourself, Malfoy. Packing for everyone helps me manage pre-voyage stress but it doesn't mean I'm your servant."

He sat up. "Right. Then stop fussing."

"I would, but I'm trying to imagine a way for us to go out among normal people again without making a spectacle out of ourselves, and these look-at-me-I'm-posh-and-important robes are making it hard."

Malfoy scoffed. "Guess you'd know a few things about show-off prat male companions - Viktor Krum, Harry Potter - "

"And now Draco Malfoy. Yes, it's a natural progression."

The roll of socks came flying back in her direction.

"Honestly," she resumed. "We need to find you something to wear out of here."

Malfoy stood and lifted the crumpled robe from the floor, folding it over his arm. "Why, Granger? It's not like we'll be sneaking out? Berlant knows I'm going. Frankly, she couldn't be happier."

With her toe, Hermione nudged a book fallen out of Malfoy's bag. The silence was telling.

He clucked his tongue. "You haven't informed the hospital you're leaving."

"No."

"But Weasley knows, yeah?"

"He knows," she began, "about the trip to Australia - in principle. And he's in denial, but he has been told he's not coming with me. As for the rest of the details…"

Malfoy whistled at their feet. "He doesn't know you're going right now, and he has no idea you're going with me."

Hermione nodded.

"Look, Granger, I could not care less about your love life, but if you don't personally tell someone your plans, they're going to assume I've kidnapped you and they'll hunt me down like the criminal they're sure I am. Not a great way to rewrite my bad story."

"I know."

"So fix it."

"I will," she said, head still down, foot still shaping the pile of clothing on the floor between them.

"Oh, chin up, Granger," he bawled, grabbing both of her arms a little above her elbows, swaying her back and forth. "Where's that storied Gryffindor integrity? Confess to your fiance you're running away with someone else. Convince him it's for his eventual greater good. How hard could it be?"

"Shut up, Malfoy." She twisted out of his hold, taking the robe from him, lifting her head, "I've got it! Wait here."

When she came back, she was no longer carrying Malfoy's court robes, but a ratty paper sac. "I traded," she explained, spilling the bag onto the bedspread. "I traded your clothes for these."

Malfoy hooked his finger in a swath of dark brown corduroy. He lifted it to his nose, then dropped it, gagging.

"Don't be a baby, Malfoy. There's still time to wash it."

"What is it?"

"It's our fellow patient Davey Mickeldee's best set of clothes, and I was lucky to persuade him to give them to us. Try them on."

She let herself out again, leaving him alone to change. "Malfoy," she called, rapping on the door when he was taking too long. "How are they? Let me see. Open up."

He sighed so loudly she heard him through the closed door. "Granger, it's obvious you still harbour a lot of latent anger toward me."

"What are you on about now? Just open up."

The door cracked away from its jamb and there was Malfoy, all in browns, wearing the trousers and textured layers of a skinny sixty-year-old psychiatric in-patient who shares the same initials as him.

"Under no circumstances," he said, "will I wear the hat."

\--------------------

After close to an hour of arguing about whether hipster-indie-charity-shop fashion was still a viable look in London, Hermione left Malfoy's room looking for a strong magical laundry detergent. By the time Malfoy's new clothes were folded neatly in his room, she was exhausted, lying in her own bed beneath the skylight, as if it was a screen on which she was visualizing a scene where she explained tomorrow's plans to Ron and he wished her off with grace and enthusiasm. She needed to see how such a thing could be done, but nothing would resolve on the dark glass above her head.

She rolled onto her side, facing the small table where another glass, a gold-coloured compact mirror with the initials R&H engraved on its lid sat primly folded shut. It was Ron's gift to her on the first anniversary of their first kiss, in Hogwarts, in the war, in front of everyone. Since then, she used it like a Muggle mobile phone to talk to him when they were separated. They both liked it so well, Ron and George were about to produce them in large quantities to sell in the shop - without the personalized engraving, of course. The compact had been intentionally left behind at the Burrow when she first went to the hospital, for therapeutic reasons. But Ron had brought it along and insisted she keep it at his latest visit.

If she opened the compact now, she could see his face and tell him straight away that she was leaving the hospital tomorrow, leaving the country, staying away until she found her parents. It was what Ron deserved. But if he knew, he would come and complicate everything. There would certainly be a row, maybe one awful and sad enough to convince her to change all of her plans, undermining everything, keeping her living exactly as dictated. No, the only way to protect Hermione's plan and her whole future was to defy the established order of things. And that meant keeping Ron from finding out she had gone until she was safely away and there was nothing he could do to stop her.

How does that saying go again? The one about it being easier to ask forgiveness than permission?

Shifting onto her back again, Hermione tried to get a different scene to form on the skylight - one where she explained to Dr. Berlant that she was discharging herself early to flee the country with a problem fellow patient with a dark and nasty past. Telling Dr. Berlant she was leaving with Malfoy might be almost as fraught as telling one of her more remote future in-laws - Percy or maybe Charlie. It wouldn't devolve into a yelling, weeping catastrophe but it certainly would not be a gentle handing-over of a war hero with delicate mental health to the heir of the Death Eater Malfoys. No, Dr. Berlant couldn't be told either.

Malfoy - Hermione had read enough of her mother's Victorian Muggle novels to know the word "elopement" and what one looked like. And she had far more than enough heart to understand that Ron could well end up feeling not just excluded from a trip but utterly betrayed.

I could not care less about your love life…

She wished Ron had heard Malfoy say it. His words meant they would return from Australia not far from where they were right now. She was connected to Malfoy as something more like a colleague, not much like a friend. They were two people who worked quite well together, hardly friendly, but effective when intent on accomplishing a task, like breaking the Innocentia spell or scheming to take control of their lives. And after the task was accomplished, it would be no trouble at all for them to separate, returning to their real lives. Surely Ron could understand that. It was true, wasn't it?

She blinked at the dark glass in the ceiling. No, of course he wouldn't. Loyalty like Ron's would never be able to relate to what she was about to do.

No more thinking and mulling. She reached for the R&H compact and flipped it open. Immediately, Ron's sleeping face filled the mirror, mouth slack and open, cheek flattened against his pillow. He must have gone to sleep watching his end of it, waiting for her to call for him.

"Ron? Ron, wake up."

He didn't even snort in his sleep.

"Ronald, it's me. I need to talk to you."

His brow furrowed and he closed his mouth in a frown, his eyes shut all the while.

"Ronald, it's about Australia. Wake up so I can tell you."

There was a blur of movement in the mirror as his hand lunged out from beneath his blanket and slammed the compact shut.


	7. Seven

Teary and raw, Hermione sat up on the edge of her hospital bed. All night, nothing had been visible in the mirror of her Communication Compact but the dark, dusty underside of Ron's bed. She had bawled into the mirror anyway, explaining what she could, loud and messy, hoping he would wake up and hear. She had barely slept at all before waking to the minute sound of fingers tapping at her door. Swathed in her blanket, she let Draco Malfoy inside.

"You're not dressed," he said, fiddling with Davey Mikeldee's belt buckle beneath a cardigan sweater he had disavowed as "waxy" when he first saw it the day before but which he was wearing now. This morning, he'd fastened the belt through a different hole than he had used yesterday, as if the mere possibility of leaving St. Mungo's was restoring his girth and health with every minute.

She closed the door behind him, humming as she pulled her blanket closer, hiding the thick, white pajamas she had worn throughout her stay here - the ones Malfoy had seen her dressed in every day, even when they were both wet and too close to one another. This morning, the coverage of the white cloth felt inadequate.

Malfoy hummed too. "So I'm to understand from this, and from the way the Weasley clan didn't appear in my room last night to have a go at me, that you're not coming along today."

She was protesting. "No, no look. I've packed everything. See? It doesn't look like much of a bag but with an extension charm - "

"Then let's go."

The blanket wound around her more tightly, constricting, as she explained her unfinished business, the glitch in the Communication Compact plan, the fact that Ron still didn't know anything about her plans and, if he never searched under his bed, he never would.

Malfoy turned to sit on the bare sheet of her bed, thinking. "Leave it," he said. "You can still reach him later this morning if we can manage to cleanly apparate out of here, find what we need in town, and then get to the manor before anyone starts looking for you at breakfast."

The sun was beginning to rise, not with orange and pink, not with a show of fiery colour, but with a slowly mounting grey glow, lightening the deep blue of the retreating night. Whatever light he was in, Malfoy's face was set in a monochrome palette, and looking at him now in the rising grey, he seemed to Hermione like the living image of their sad, difficult looming mission.

Breaking the vision, he spoke again. "Even if anyone does succeed in putting it all together and comes looking for you at the manor, it's not the kind of place people can just apparate in and out of as they please - "

"Yes, don't I know."

"You're not scared to go back to the manor," he said. No, Malfoy Manor was the first place - perhaps the only place - he had ever done anything to protect her, anything besides threatening that she'd better get out of his sight. Underneath the chandelier of Malfoy Manor was where he had shrunk from identifying her and Ron and Harry to Death Eaters and snatchers, to his own parents. They both knew it.

"Tick-tock, Granger."

The blanket fell to the floor as she pushed him toward the door. "I'll be on the green in ten minutes. Wait for me there."

Disapparating inside the hospital would trip an alarm, but walking outside was good for the nerves, good for the body and freely permitted. As agreed, Malfoy left first, making a show of haughtily striding past the night nurse's desk and out the doors, not stopping to sign a single one of his discharge papers. Dr. Berlant had told the nurse to expect him to do just that, and she noted the time on a parchment without a word.

Hermione came a few moments later, bulky in her white hospital smock worn over her own clothing from the morning she had arrived here, her traveling bag bulging in the smock's front pocket.

"Morning, Jean. You're up early," the nurse called. "Are you quite alright?"

"Yes, just off to get a proper look at the sunrise."

"Isn't that nice..."

On the main floor, at the admitting desk, a lone security guard sat reheating a pot of already awful coffee, scrambling to restore the illusion that he'd been awake and watchful all through the night. He may not have noticed Hermione if she hadn't trotted up to him, smiling like her mother greeting patients in her dental surgery. "Excuse me, good morning." She flashed her beaded hospital bracelet at him. "Could I trouble you to retrieve an item of jewelry I deposited in the safe here a few weeks ago? It's my engagement ring and it turns out I can't stand being parted from it." She forced a laugh.

The ring was on her finger, glittering in the yellowing light by the time she found Malfoy on the lawn outside, at the edge of the grounds.

"Right," he began. "So first we get to London, to an office called the British Dental Association. I found it on a map in a guidebook to Muggle London someone left on the shelf in the common room. Stroke of luck, that. They say the office is in Marylebone and they keep a directory of all their current and past members so they should be able to confirm whether your parents are truly in Australia."

Shaking her head, she stopped him. "We'll look like lunatics if we do that. That's not how Muggles find things out. Not anymore." Instead, she told him about a system of machines with every book and map and list from every library in the Muggle world jammed onto them, all of them joined together, where anyone with a tiny machine of their own could ask this great, worldwide, disjointed mind whatever they wanted and have answers in seconds. "All we need to do," she explained, "is get to a shop where we can buy our own little mobile machine."

Malfoy raised his eyebrows. "When did they nick the magic for all of that?"

"No magic needed, Malfoy. The machines are made with silicon and maths and they run on electricity. You know, like a difficult potions experiment. Don't pull that face, Malfoy. This is what Muggles are really like. They tend to be clever and cooperative precisely because they can't rely on magic. You see? Clever, like they raised me to be."

One thing they could agree on was that Marylebone would still do well enough for an aparation destination. That was the easy part of the morning's negotiations.

"I say we side-along aparate," she offered. "It'll be an awful bother if we wind up wasting the morning trying to find each other in the city."

"Agreed. I'll lead."

"You? How long have you been licensed, Malfoy? When was your seventeenth birthday? When was the last time - "

"You know," he interrupted, "I think now would be a good time for you to tell me if there is any truth to the rumour about you splinching the bloody hell out of Weasley in an aparation accident."

"That was under exigent circumstances - "

"It is true," he pounced. "I lead."

"For goodness sake, we've aparated safely a thousand times since then. If you're going to be horrible, there are other options besides side-along. We can always charm a set of matched objects to home in on each other. That way we can find each other and stay in touch without having to - stay in touch. Now give me your wrist. No, the one with the hospital bracelet."

Somehow, he had forgotten to tear his bracelet off his wrist in a triumphant, defiant shower of beads on the hospital floor as he walked out that morning. He was still wearing it, tucked inside the cuff of his cardigan. Hermione's wand sparked pink over his wrist.

"Watch it."

"Oh, you're fine," she said, turning to her own bracelet.

Malfoy waited in the near-daylight, getting nervous, hungry, eyeing a ring on her finger that he'd never noticed before. "Granger, let's - "

There was a loud crack, an apparation nearby, probably nothing, the opening sound in what would be a volley of doctors, nurses, cooks, porters all arriving for their day's work at St. Mungo's.

Only it wasn't that at all.

On the grass, about 200 metres from where Hermione stood enchanting their bracelets, Ron Weasley was now skidding in the grass, barefoot in boxer shorts and a vest, hollering her name. He was wide awake, clenching his end of the Communication Compact in one hand. He had looked for it as soon as he'd awakened that morning, realized it had been transmitting all night, found the traces of the words she had called into it - some crazy, weepy story about leaving tomorrow with a traveling companion she hadn't been able to bring herself to name.

Malfoy swore.

Ron seemed to hear it over his own shouting, swiveling his head toward them. He called her name again, running, sliding on the cold, wet grass in his bare feet. In seconds he would be in reach, and it would be over.

"This is it, Granger," Malfoy said. "I'm not staying to tangle with Weasley."

Her face was all pain as she stood twisting the ring on her finger, reeling between her past and her future, watching Ron crash toward them.

A complex sequence of thought and action unfolded in an instant, quick as electricity, its complexity doing nothing to make it any less inevitable. Malfoy knew if Hermione tried to apparate this way, her heart and mind torn and doubled by the sight of Ron begging her to wait, she wouldn't survive - not in one piece. Intention is the engine of apparation and hers was in tatters. If she waited until the last moment and tried to apparate with any hesitation left - it was terribly dangerous.

"Hermione, no!"

"Granger, yes?"

Weasley was nearly within arms' reach, distraught and desperate, but vanishing from Hermione's sight as Malfoy pivoted, wand out, turning sharply into the apparation maneuvre, inserting himself between them, snatching her around the waist, her hands coming together behind his back, the fingers of her right hand plucking the ring from her left, leaving it to fall through space, into the grass at Ron's feet as the pair of them snapped, and disappeared.

\--------------------

Porters brought Ron Weasley up a service elevator and into the psychiatric unit at the top of St. Mungo's Hospital. At the sound of them coming struggling, shouting down the corridor, the night nurse was on her feet, wand flying to alert Dr. Berlant of trouble at the hospital. Ron was dressed in a white hospital smock and recovering from the effects of a stupefy spell by the time the doctor arrived and realized with a chill who he was.

"Hermione!" he choked as the doctor wanded the rest of the stupefaction away.

Dr. Berlant glanced at Whalen who was already leaving the examination room, hurrying down the corridor to Hermione's room. "Jean? Yes, good morning Davey. Don't you look fancy today. Jean? Have any of you seen Jean this morning?"

"Mr. Weasley, please," the doctor began. "What are you doing here in this state?"

"Hermione," he said again. "She was outside, and this skinny old man in a huge brown cardigan took her, took her away right before my eyes. Side-along disapparted when I could almost touch her. Look, this is all that's left." He fumbled with the diamond ring, gasped, caught it, picked a blade of grass out of its setting. "She tossed it to me like a life-line just as she vanished. Help me, help us!"

Scowling, Dr. Berlant stood up just as Whalen was returning to the room to confirm Hermione was indeed missing. "Roll call," she said, gesturing at Ron, "if this one is in his right mind, there may be one more missing, someone from among our older gentlemen."

Whalen nodded, following Berlant, Ron calling out protests as the door closed and locked behind them. There was no need for roll call. As Berlant stepped into the dining room where the patients were assembled for breakfast, she notice - as everyone had - Davey Mikeldee dressed not in his white pajamas but in dark, elaborate dress robes monogrammed with his initials. Berlant swore softly enough for no one but Whalen to hear.

\-----------------

A flock of tiny birds flitted up and out of a massive overgrown hedge when the air cracked open at its base. In the grass was a mass of arms, legs and hair which, when separated, would prove to be two whole, undamaged individuals. The trajectory of his turn on St. Mungo's lawn had kept Malfoy moving in Hermione's direction all through the aparation, until the ground at her back stopped them, and he had crashed on top of her in tall, unmown grass.

"Get OFF me Malfoy."

He flexed his arms to push himself away but fell back, swallowing hard, breathing deeply against the side of her head.

"Malfoy, if you vomit in my ear, so help me - "

He rolled away from her and she sat up, turning to watch him curl into a ball on his side until the nausea stopped crashing and ebbed away. It had been too long since his last apparation after all.

"Not a word, Granger," he said, pushing himself to sitting. He found her smiling, almost laughing at him. It was annoying but a welcome change in tone from the drama of her breaking her own heart - or whatever that mess outside St. Mungo's had been.

"Pardon me," he said first. "If you want to turn around and go back, I get it. It felt like there was no time for me to wait for your consent and I was worried you'd splinch and - please. Go back if you have to. Pardon me."

She was stunned, blinking, watching the top of his head as it hung in an attitude she had seldom seen on him before - shame. Being raised in a sanctimonious aristocratic wizarding family might be the worst thing to have ever happened to Draco Malfoy but it was not completely without redeeming qualities, like the powerful sense of chivalry that came with it, especially between men and women. In the Malfoy family, side-along apparation was justified for the conveyance of under-aged wizards and witches, for convenience between consenting adults, and only to be used non-consensually in times of emergency. Malfoy couldn't be sure that his use of it just now could be justified by any of those things, and he begged her pardon, his face curtained by his hair.

He raised his head, still puzzled. "You lost it. That ring."

She stood up. "No, I tossed it. Well, let it go, for now. I gave it back into Ron's keeping just as we disapparated. That was my consent. That was my choice. I will cry about it all later, I'm sure." She perched her hands on her hips. "But for now, on with the morning. On with your explanation for why this is not Marylebone."


	8. Eight

The dizziness abated enough for Draco Malfoy to finally stand up after his first apparation in over two years. On his feet, he looked from side to side, pulled a leaf from a hedge as if it was a botanical exhibit, and nodded sharply. The grass had grown tall and the hedges were shaggy as great hairy ogres, but he would have been able to tell just from the smell and taste of the air in this place that he was in his long lost miserable ancestral home.

"This," he told Hermione, far too grandly, "is Malfoy Manor. We're here because I didn't trust myself to do a rushed, side-along apparation after all this time with the kind of neat elegance we'd need to arrive and carry on in a busy street. I trusted you to do it even less, with the man of your dreams, or whatever, bearing down on us in his night-clothes. So at the last minute I brought us somewhere I couldn't possibly miss, and where, if we did botch it, no one would notice."

She had to admit this was fair enough, even wise, considering how it had turned out with both of them landing in a heap. But she had to add, "And I suppose it's not at all relevant that you can find something here to wear beside Davey Mikeldee's street clothes."

"If you mean to ask, can we find some of the supplies you were whinging about not having while packing last night, then yes, that's a benefit of coming here too. Though," he narrowed his eyes, squinting through the hedges, "it looks like my parents made good on their intentions to send everyone away and seal the place up until after they're rehabilitated. Place is hardly recognizable." He began walking along the border of the hedge, looking for a way beyond it.

"Always so practical, your parents," Hermione said. "I'm all for practical now. Did you notice, Malfoy? Did you notice I'm following behind you, looking for a gate instead of lying in the lane-way bawling my eyes out at losing yet another entire family, my Weasleys this time, a wonderful loving family, for the second time in my life?"

From over his shoulder, he turned to look at her. "Maybe you're not bawling, but your eyes are doing that 'swimming' thing."

She choked out a little sob, then another, fighting to stifle the sound as they walked and walked around the manor grounds. "Go ahead, Granger," he said, finally, shouting in an almost jolly way. "Let it all out. Everyone cries at Malfoy Manor."

Behind him, her sob changed a little. He turned, walking backwards, facing her. She was finished crying, almost laughing now. "You're so horrible," she said. And they smiled at each other, eye to eye, like actual friends for a moment. "Where is the gate, Malfoy? We need to get inside before anyone comes after us."

At that, he stopped before a slight bend in the hedge. "This is where the ends have grown together. The gate should be here."

She stepped forward to see.

He pointed through the leaves. "Lookit. They enchanted the hedge to grow ten years worth of foliage for every two and it's gone and entombed the gates."

She smirked. "Sleeping Beauty's castle."

"Well, it's old, Grade II listed, but it's just a house."

"No, I don't mean literally. I'm talking about an imaginary castle in a story, a Muggle fairy tale. Yes, they have them too, Malfoy. Even one about a thicket of thorns that grows for a hundred years to protect the castle of an innocent princess held captive in an enchanted sleep."

Malfoy was muttering something about anti-magical propaganda.

"Don't be like that," she teased, hooking her arm around his neck and craning it uncomfortably downward, like she was George Weasley. He yelled out, shocked, but she shouted over him. "And if this is Sleeping Beauty's castle, Malfoy, then that would make you the trapped princess yourself."

"Get off me, Granger."

She stepped away, laughing again. "Sleeping Beauty was probably pretty skinny when she woke up too."

He rubbed his neck with his palm, peering through the thinnest spot in the hedge. "It's a good spell, one of my mother's. Her specialty is defending the household."

He didn't see Hermione roll her eyes at the sky.

"The gates usually open up on their own when I'm this close," he said, dropping his hand from his neck, clenching his fists at his sides. He was about to grab onto the wrought iron gate of his ancestral home, begging entry like a stranger. Hermione had seen the gates open before, when she had been dragged here by snatchers, and she leaned forward to see it again - the bending and twisting, gliding and grating, reworking of the metal. But nothing moved at all when Malfoy's palm gripped an iron bar.

"So it's like that, is it, mother?" he said. "Yes, of course it is."

"Can't you break the spell?" Hermione asked, her sense of their exposure here growing with the prospect of there being nowhere nearby to go to if he couldn't coax the gate to open. Surely the hospital was starting to understand they'd better look for her here. Davey Mikeldee had probably worn Malfoy's dress robes to breakfast by now, and perhaps told everyone she was the one who made the trade.

"I can break it," Malfoy said. "But this is the charmed eight-hundred-year-old house of an ancient wizarding family with a grossly misguided purity fetish, so you're not going to like it, Granger. Look away, if you want."

She didn't. She watched as he took his wand and stabbed it like a lancet into the pad of his left thumb. He squeezed the flesh near the wound until a large drop of blood quivered on his skin. Then, stepping as close to the hedge as he could, he reached for the gate, smearing his blood in a descending line along the metal. As he withdrew, the bars began to lurch and groan, dust and rust rained down, leaves and twigs curved and snapped, and a space appeared in the gate large enough for a healthy Draco Malfoy.

"Take my hand," he said, extending the unbloodied one toward her. "Take it, Granger, or you'll be shut outside." Together, they passed into the manor grounds.

\------------------------

George Weasley bounced out of the lift at the top floor of St. Mungo's Hospital. He was the person Ron had sent for to come to his rescue with a set of street clothes and the assurances Dr. Berlant was insisting upon before she would discharge him.

"It's unheard of, keeping me here like this," Ron railed to Whalen as they waited for George.

She was not at all fazed. "The ministry granted psychiatric doctors full discretion to detain during the last war, actually. It's never been repealed."

"No, but I'm not crazy, I'm gutted. Who in their right mind wouldn't be?"

His panic had deepened into grief once the doctor succeeded in convincing him that the wraithish white-haired man in brown whom he had seen snatching Hermione on the lawn outside was, in fact, Draco Malfoy. This was the name of the traveling companion which she could not bring herself to speak into the Communication Compact while Ron slept.

"I can't stay here," he told the doctor. "They're not far yet. They've got to be at his manor right now. They have to be, getting ready to go overseas to Australia. What are we doing sat here? Malfoy Manor's not so great. All I need to get in there is a house elf. There must be loads of them in your kitchen. Someone - "

"Mr. Weasley," the doctor interrupted. "Even if you were to succeed in finding the pair of them today, why would the results be any different now than they were this morning on the green? She chooses to be away from you right now. That we know. But it doesn't mean she'll choose the same thing tomorrow, or the next day, or the next."

He groaned, rolled the band of the diamond ring between his fingers.

Now that George had arrived, Ron was dressed and morose, no longer talking about raiding Malfoy Manor. "Mate," was all George could say before Ron slumped against his shoulder like he might cry. "Aw, Ronnie boy. Better now than at a mid-life crisis, yeah? You're still young, still a war hero, no kids, hair's probably about to start thinning but you've got all your teeth - "

"Misters Weasley, if you please," Dr. Berlant said, motioning them to sit a little longer. "I've come to know Hermione well since she came under my care, and I hope you'll accept some counsel from me on how to approach this situation. Hermione is attempting to take control of her life by making rash choices. She lost her youth to fighting monsters and in some ways is still a teenager - as I reckon you all are, in your own ways."

George's chair creaked as he said, "Fair enough."

The doctor continued. "Remember that the root of Hermione's illness is not the experiences of violence you shared together. If you're right about her agreeing to hide out in Malfoy Manor, the place where she was tortured with a Cruciatus curse, then it proves the point completely. The true root of her illness - the stress and sleeplessness, the anxiety and sadness - is her horror at her own choice, the one she made to give up her relationship with her parents. And you are complicit in it."

"Nah," Ron said. "She confided in me. I didn't make her do anything."

"Mr. Weasley, do you remember the conversations you had with her, leading up to the day she executed the memory charm? Do remember what you said to her when she asked what you planned to do to protect your own family?"

He shrugged. "That's different. My family were Order of the Phoenix. They could defend themselves."

Berlant raised her forefinger. "But that's not what you said. You said there were too many of them to hide and they couldn't leave their jobs."

"Well, that was true too."

George whistled beside him. "Weak, Ron. And don't forget, we didn't all successfully defend ourselves."

His face blanched. "No, we didn't but - "

"Would you have done it?" the doctor demanded. "To save your brother? Would you have obliviated all eight of your immediate family members' memories? Changed their names and dispersed them? Is your family more precious than Hermione's simply because it's bigger? Would you have raised your wand and wiped out all connections between the nine of you? Would it have been worth it?"

He couldn't answer, couldn't turn his head to look at George for an answer.

"These are the kinds of questions tormenting your fiancee, you see," the doctor resumed. "The guilt and uncertainty surrounding that one unthinkable choice. And you are complicit in that choice because you knew about it before it happened and you encouraged it, accepted it as inevitable without questioning her, without helping her find an alternative, all the while refusing to even consider making the same kind of sacrifice yourself. How do you think Hermione feels about that?"

Ron scrubbed his face with his hands. "So I'm not just a clown, I'm a monster." George's hand was on Ron's shoulder, warm and affectionate, alive. And all Ron could think of was how he didn't deserve it - this family he'd kept through everything while Hermione lost hers. His voice broke as he asked, "What do I do?"

The doctor answered. "If she returns without her parents, you could still have a decent, if difficult, life together. If she returns with them, you might live happily ever after, as it were."

Ron was red-faced, sputtering. "And what if she comes back and doesn't want me? Or worse, what if she comes back as Madam Malfoy?"

The doctor was shaking her head before he could finish. "No, no, no, that cannot be allowed to happen. Which is why, Mr. Weasley, you are going to calm down, and remain involved as a supportive but absent partner in Hermione's journey. Starting tomorrow, you will use whatever means you have to send cheerful, loving messages to her, doing nothing - do you hear me, Mr. Weasley - nothing to impede her reunion with her parents. It's the only chance you have of rehabilitating this relationship."

George drove Ron home in the muggle car, listening to him rant over the situation all over again.

"Calm? That doctor wants me to keep calm? Hermione never loved me for my calm. You believe that, don't you George? And she's not in love with him, with Malfoy. I know she's not."

"No one said she was. Course she's not. A prat like that. She'd have to have the worst judgment in men ever to go for someone so clearly unfit for - "

Ron interrupted with a groan nearly loud enough to be a growl. "She does, she has the worst taste in men, I mean - OBVIOUSLY." He pointed sharply at his own chest. "And what was that psychiatrist even saying? I'm responsible for both killing Fred and obliviating the Grangers? How did that go again?"

George shushed him. "Ron, look - hey, just forget all that and think of it this way. It's really very simple. Think of it as a new start for you."

"I hate that."

"Really, Ronnie, think of it. The joke shop - that's not your dream. That's Fred's dream. You stepped into it because your dream was for Fred not to be dead. I hear you, mate. That's my dream too. But I've let you try to fulfill that wish for me for too long. I'm managing alright now. So take this push your near-missus has given you as an opportunity to rewrite your future, do what you want, whether that's going back to being an Auror or something completely different. Go out and become the kind of Ronald Weasley who doesn't have to feel like he needs to keep apologizing for being the one to bag the brightest witch of our age." He reached over the seat to clap Ron on the back.

"Rewrite," Ron repeated. "That was the strangest thing Hermione was on about before she left - talking about some invisible, all-powerful author who's writing our lives into a book. Look how she finished off Hermione's story, tucking a woman like that into a cozy corner as the joke-shop-man's wife."

George scoffed. "Don't be daft."

"No, just go with it for a moment. If that's right, then the author hasn't really done me any favours either, awarding me the best wife in the world but leaving me like this. That's no way to write it."

George brought his fist down on the vinyl dash of the car. "I demand a rewrite."

But Ron was exhausted from all the indignation today, fading quickly. "Nah, it's bollocks," he said, slumping against the car's window. They had turned onto the lane to the Burrow. Molly Weasley was standing in the distance, on the porch outside the house. Seeing the car approach, she raised both of her hands and waved.

"It's no use, George," Ron said. "I want nothing but to get her back."


	9. Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Inside Malfoy Manor

Marching up the gravel drive outside the manor, Draco Malfoy swatted away Hermione Granger's hand.

"Let me see it, Malfoy. You need a tetanus shot."

"I need no such thing."

"You've just mashed an open wound against a rusty pole. That is how people get tetanus. You know tetanus - lockjaw? It's blood-borne. You could die in excruciating pain - "

"Speaking of which," he interrupted. "You recognize the place now, don't you?"

He stopped, leaned back, looked up at the dark house, its diamond window panes dull with dust. The roof bristled with chimneys but there wasn't a whiff of smoke. While he stood almost reeling with the sight of the manor in this state, Hermione grabbed the hand hanging limply at his left side to inspect the wound on his thumb. "Go ahead and look, Granger, but it's not like you can see tetanus."

She hummed, determined to ignore the house for as long as she could. "It's clotted but you definitely need to wash it."

"I'll see to it once we're inside. No point cleaning up until we find out how much more blood my mother's magic might demand before letting us indoors."

As it turned out, Malfoy Manor had all it wanted, and the massive front doors parted for him, creaking as if to tear themselves apart on stiff pewter hinges when he pressed his fingertips against the wood. Inside, the main hall was cold and empty of everything but large pieces of furniture covered in white sheets, like the set of an old horror movie. The atmosphere couldn't have been more different from the first time Hermione had been brought here by a mob of mercenaries, all shrieks and curses, fire burning on every hearth and candle, polished crystal glittering everywhere. Today, even in the sunlight, the manor was silent and so very sad, haunted but not with ghosts. Perhaps, one.

"Are you alright?"

Malfoy and Hermione had turned to each other and asked the question almost in unison as the doors closed behind them. Too embarrassed, neither of them answered, and the questions were left to hang as Malfoy moved toward the stairs.

"I'm going up to change clothes - that is, if there's anything of mine left," he said.

"Shall I come with you?"

He looked at his feet, one hand on the wrought iron banister, a smoother, more ornate rendition of the gates outside. He had never done anything with the compassion Hermione and her friends had offered him in the past but lash back at it in anger. Of course, that had been before the fiendfyre in the Room of Requirement, when they had flown over the flames to save Malfoy's life, Weasley complaining loudly about it but doing it anyway. Hermione made her offer to follow him into the empty inner chambers of his house gambling that his response to compassion would have changed since then. Maybe she would have made the gamble regardless. In this vast, desolate house, the health and colour that had been returning to him had dimmed, and he was becoming the wraith once again.

"No need," he said, finally. "Unless, you're not comfortable down here - on your own - so near - "

"No, it's fine. I'm fine."

He took a single step up the staircase. "Right. I'm just up here, if anything goes wrong. You're welcome to start scrounging for supplies, if you like. But take care. The house is like a bad dog who only minds its masters. Oh, and the drawing room is through there, so you know. You might want to avoid the dining room as well - just - because."

What had happened here?

Hermione had read not quite enough of her mother's Victorian novels to know that by parting with Malfoy in an evil old house, she was now caught in the role of Gothic heroine, and exploring the rooms by herself was doomed to end badly, as it always does. Nothing much went wrong as she roamed through the kitchen. Despite the years of disuse, it was immaculate, completely without any mice or other creatures to spring from hiding places to startle her. Even the film of dust on the uncovered surfaces was pristine, in its way, unsullied by paw-prints, cobwebs, insect tracks. Narcissa Malfoy's magic was formidable. None of the drawers or cupboards would open when Hermione pulled at their sculpted metal knobs.

Empty-handed, she went back into the main hall, passing through a different door without realizing what she'd done. That was the simplest explanation, at any rate. But Malfoy Manor was a charmed house, crafty enough to lead her along.

Without the chaos, the drawing room was unrecognizable at first, and she couldn't tell she was in it until she saw the chandelier, restored to its form from before her last visit here, when it had been wrenched out of the ceiling to scare off Bellatrix Lestrange and save her life. How had the crashing tangle of crystal, metal, and fire not killed her? In that tired old London show Hermione's mother liked so well, wasn't it a falling chandelier that killed everybody? Hermione looked to the strong bolts fastening the base of the chandelier to the ceiling beams. Eyes closed, she imagined the sky beyond the ceiling, clear country blue and extending up to that high, unseeable vantage from which the author-mother was directing them all, torturing her and sparing her by turns.

Was the meaning of what happened to Hermione here during the war really as pure as receiving the sacrifice of a house elf - a sacrifice no wizard deserved? Or was it just a page in a contrived love story, where what mattered most was that she had heard Ron answering each of her screams, a frantic but helpless voice from the cellar, loud enough to pass for love? Where, exactly, had Malfoy been when the chandelier fell? And where was he now?

A tone sounded through the room, and Hermione opened her eyes. It was a sound she knew, like silverware clinking against a crystal wine glass, only louder and clearer than she'd ever heard it at a dinner table. It sounded just once, reverberating between the wood-paneled walls.

"Malfoy?"

No one answered. She turned to leave the room, and heard it again, redoubled, two clinks over-laying one another, emanating from above her head. The chandelier was shimmering, shaking where it dangled from the ceiling. Whatever was moving it seemed to be compressing the air in the room, heavy, pulling at her limbs, crushing her chest. She let out her breath in a rush only to find she couldn't draw it in again. The crystal clattered and jerked on its silvery chains and hoops, groaning and swaying. She dropped to her knees, crawling toward the door on the hard, now un-carpeted floor, breathless but fighting to call out for help.

"Maf-malf -" Her eyes closed again, clenched shut as she gasped for breath. "Malfoy!" Her crawl collapsed and she was lying face down on the floor, pushing against it with her palms, crushed.

There were feet skidding to a stop in front of her, hands under her arms pulling her across the floor, out of the drawing room, and a voice shouting "Colloportus!" The doors to the drawing room slammed with a sound that was both a crack and a thud.

"Granger, I told you - hey, hey, it's okay. Breathe in through your nose, blow out through your mouth, out. Calm down, there's no one here but us. Breathe with me, look at me, breathe…"

Malfoy had knelt on the floor in front of her in the main hall. He hoisted her into a sitting position as her hands flailed at him, finally grasping the front of his shirt, crumpling it in her fists. Their eyes were wide and fixed on each other, his face not wraithish but wild and animated, flushed as he showed her with his head, shoulders and voice how to breathe, deeply and slowly, until her body took up the rhythm on its own again. Frenzy subsiding, she slumped forward, her head on his chest, her shoulders heaving as she cried against him for the second time in the four weeks since their re-acquaintance.

Not sure she could sit up alone yet, he left his hands gripped around her arms, and in his relief that she wasn't dying on the floor of his house again, he uttered a little laugh. "What were you playing at, Granger? A PTSD patient ignoring good advice and wandering off into the drawing room where she was traumatized, and triggering a panic attack? Brightest witch of her age, my arse."

"Shut up, Malfoy," she said, muffled against his chest.

"Yes, 'shut up Malfoy.' But no 'get off me, Malfoy.' Definitely progress at tolerating one another."

She sat up straight. "I didn't mean to go into the drawing room. Your mother's house tricked me into it."

He patted her back. "That's not impossible."

"I hate it here."

"Yes, everyone does."

Her fists unclenched, releasing the fabric of his shirt, noticing it was not Davey Mikeldee's cardigan, her mind eager for distraction. "You found clothes."

"Yeah, how do I look?"

She blinked. Black trousers, white shirt, some kind of faux-hooligan black jacket, and nothing from the perennially overdressed wardrobe of rings and silk cravats she remembered him wearing while with his parents, out of school. There was something showy about him anyway. "I guess you look like a pop star, with a light drug addiction."

He let go of her, laughing, sitting back to pat his nearly hollowed stomach. "We need to find something to eat."

"I'm sorry," she said. "And I'm humiliated. I honestly thought I'd be alright left on my own down here. I was fine until the chandelier…" She trailed off, looking into his face again. "That day, when Bellatrix - you know," she began. "How did the chandelier come to fall, and why didn't it kill me?"

Malfoy swallowed hard, but replied lightly. "You were there, Granger. You could see as well as anyone that the elf did it. And we had those plush carpets on the floor that day. They would have cushioned the impact."

She shook her head. "I do believe Dobby infiltrated the house and freed the others through his own natural gifts and I will always honor that. But that chandelier wasn't cushioned by any carpet, it was blown to bits and - you know this house, Malfoy. How can it be possible that a house elf, even an exceptional one, a free one, outmaneuvered centuries of charms and, with your mother standing right there watching him, took control of a piece of this house the size of that chandelier, destroyed it, but did so with such control that I was saved from being crushed to death by it? I wasn't even hurt, though Griphook's bones were broken, and the chandelier itself was wrecked."

He shrugged. "I'm sure it was terrifying from your point of view. But did the chandelier look wrecked to you, just now?"

Staring at the closed drawing room doors, she pictured it in her mind as she had most recently seen it. "No," she admitted. "I'm sure your mother was perfectly capable of repairing it to perfection, no matter how badly it was damaged. But I remember the aftermath of the fall well. I saw it on your face. The flying crystal cut your face. I saw you bleeding before your mother took you away."

She leaned forward, closer, looking for a trace, a scar on his face, a sign of a cut healed years ago. Through the leanness of his face, she watched the musculature of his jaw tightening as she approached, as her fingers hovered just above his still-flushed cheek. She was about to touch him when Malfoy stood up, quickly.

"What're you on about, Granger? It's a simple thing, really. The elf saved you from Aunt Bella that day. That's canon. Let's eat."

In the kitchen, in the first drawer he tried, Malfoy found a shelf filled with tins of food. They gleamed like ordinary unlabeled aluminum cans, but when he tapped them with his wand they opened and flattened like plates of steaming, fresh-looking, wonderfully smelling food. Inside was a breakfast of hot eggs and sausages, served late enough in the day for the eggs to be transforming into potatoes better suited for lunch around their edges. This was more of Narcissa Malfoy's domestic magic. Hermione thought of squashy sandwiches in Weasley lunchboxes and wondered how much Madam Malfoy must have paid master wizard chefs to teach her charms like this.

"Eat up, Granger, it won't kill you - probably," Malfoy said, lifting his plate and turning to leave the kitchen.

"Wait!" she called after him. "Are you leaving? You're not really leaving me alone in this bear trap of a house to try my luck eating something from its kitchen? If it's like that, you may as well have left me to suffocate under the chandelier."

"Fine," he answered. "I'll watch you take a test bite, bezoar at the ready, but then I'm leaving."

"Whatever for?"

"I don't eat in front of other people anymore. It's too revealing, too wrong."

She clucked her tongue. "That is ludicrous. Traveling companions eat together."

"Not if they can help it."

Her plate flared red on the tabletop in front of her, reversing the cooling that had taken place while they'd argued. "Have it your way, Malfoy." She raised her fork to her mouth, hazarding a nibble, and then a bite, and then a nod across the kitchen to Malfoy. "It's okay. It's good."

Seeing she'd survived, he was gone, through the door, out of sight, eating at the covered grand piano in the main hall.

When she finished, she pushed the plate aside and laid her head on the table, exhausted. She must have wasted a full day's worth of energy panicking in the drawing room. For now, the house seemed to have reached a state of detente with her, feeding her, allowing her to rest as she waited for Malfoy to finish his meal in private.

From the hall, she heard a piano key sound as he dropped something on it, cursing, and she laughed softly at the pair of them. Mere hours into their journey it was already clear that they would fail straight away if they lost sight of the fact that they were both still sick. Neither of them had been properly discharged from St. Mungo's partly because neither of them was well enough yet. Between the two of them, she and Malfoy seemed to have enough wits and strength for one whole person. And she couldn't be sure yet if they were helping each other get well, or initiating one another into all new kinds of disordered thinking.

"That's canon" he had said. What a strange way to dismiss her probing about the chandelier. All she could make of it was a reference to her theory about the author-mother - a theory everyone else had agreed was crazy, a theory Malfoy was referencing himself now. What kind of disaster was this journey shaping itself into?

He was back in the kitchen, unconcerned about washing up. "The house will figure it out. Leave it. Time for us to pack."


	10. Ten

Based on the immense sense of satisfaction Hermione Granger is well-known to find in perfectly packed luggage, it was strange that she didn't leap up from the manor's kitchen table the moment Draco Malfoy told her, "It's time for us to pack."

He waited, approached her quietly, saw that she was asleep, her head propped on her arms at the head of the ancient beech worktable. Even without having had a panic attack that morning himself, Malfoy was exhausted too, and sleep seemed to be radiating from her in warm waves, pressing him with an urgent need to yawn. Maybe she'd be alright here, alone, while he went upstairs to bed for a little while. It had been years since he'd slept in his own bed. As he considered it, the dirty dishes he had just set down on the counter started to rattle themselves toward the sink. No, it was best not to leave her alone and defenseless against the house again.

Instead, he sat on the table, spun his feet off the ground, and lay down. The tabletop wasn't a comfortable bed but it was, in fact, only slightly harder than the mattresses on the forensics side of St. Mungo's psychiatric unit. The length of the table was shorter than he remembered it. He bent his knees and still had to slide his head all the way in Hermione's direction in order to fit. He braced himself for her eyes to open as his face got so near to hers but she didn't stir at all. How could she sleep like that, bent over at her waist right after eating?

He yawned again. Her sleep was a beacon, leading him out of consciousness, and he was only half aware that he was falling asleep gazing languidly at Hermione's face. The Future Mrs. Weasley was pretty enough, no longer the insignificant little girl he'd brushed past on the train on his first day at Hogwarts. She was now pretty enough, interesting enough that he wanted to feel the smooth, clear skin of her cheek against his sore thumb.

He shook himself, rolled onto his other side, facing the cupboards, and went to sleep.

Hermione was the first of them to wake up. It was afternoon by the time she opened her eyes to the back of Malfoy's head. Inches from her face, his hair lay white against his black collar. Maybe he'd ask her to cut it before they left the country, and she could explore it properly. Ron's hair had that peculiar ginger coarseness, no matter what elixirs she used to treat it. She sat up, stretching her hands into the air above her head, beyond the pull of the urge to test the smoothness of Malfoy's ridiculous baby hair between her fingers.

How could he sleep like that, folded into angles on a hard surface? What was strangest of all about his sleeping arrangement was that he must have brought in a slender crystal vase and set it on the table, tucked it into the crook of his bent knees, before settling down. It hadn't been there while she was eating. She would have remembered its single fresh flower, so out of place in the shuttered, empty house. The flower was shaped much like a daffodil only with pointed white petals, pale yellow only in its central cone. The arrangement was pretty but badly placed. If he moved at all, Malfoy would kick it over.

No more clattering crystal today. Hermione stood up from the table, walked around it, toward the flower in the vase. "Malfoy," she sang as she moved. "Time to wake up, Draco Malfoy."

He murmured his way back. "Hmm? Er - Ow. Granger?"

She was leaning across the table, hand extended, about to take hold of the vase and move it out of his way when his shouting stopped her. "Granger, no!"

She jolted away. "Don't yell at me. You never should have left this here."

He sat up. "I didn't leave it there. And can't you tell what kind of flower that is?"

She stared back at him, speechless, astounded at his overreaction. He was something like afraid - and angry.

"It's a narcissus," he said, pivoting off the table, standing up to grasp the vase himself, setting it on a shelf too high for Hermione to reach. "It's not safe for you. Nothing that rises up to meet you inside this house can be considered safe for you."

"Narcissus," she repeated.

"Yes, as in Narcissa. It appears my mother knows I'm here. She knows you're here. And what's more, she wants us to know that she knows. My re-entry spell at the gate must have alerted her. We can divine that kind of thing from prison now, ever since the Muggle government shamed the Ministry into abiding by the Geneva Conventions. And it appears that my mother's hold on the house is strong enough for her to reach me here, through the bricks and beams and glass."

Hermione still stood beside the table, watching stunned as Malfoy opened and closed the kitchen drawers, collecting tools and utensils.

"Then reach back for her," she ordered him. "Everyone knows she's not the worst mother in the world, and after all this time, she must be desperate - "

He was shaking his head. "No, not under these circumstances."

"What circumstances? Act like a normal person and tell your mother you're alright and that you're going away."

"Granger - "

"Don't leave without a word. You have a mother who remembers your name and longs for you and - "

"Granger!" Malfoy had stopped storming around the kitchen and come to stand directly in front of Hermione. He'd taken her face in both his hands, held her jaws against each other to keep her quiet while he whispered into her ear. "I don't know how many more times I can protect you while we stay here. My mother is determined to interfere. And she's getting brazen. If you'd touched that flower…"

Hermione stepped back, out of his hold, pressing her hand to the base of her throat, over her pounding pulse. Madam Malfoy was stalking her here, invisible and malevolent, as she ate and slept. And Draco Malfoy was protecting her. She reached for her charmed bag, held it open for Malfoy to pack it with what he'd collected so far.

"No more splitting up," he whispered. "You'll come along with me while I get the rest of what we need."

She bounced her head in a nod, accepting as he offered her his long, lean arm.

From the kitchen they took all the canned food they could, along with whatever else Malfoy had gathered. He would find the rest of his clothing upstairs, but before they went up, there was one more room to raid on the main floor.

"This is your father's study," she said as the door opened in front of them.

"You can smell him too?" Malfoy asked. He withdrew his arm from her closed hand and left her standing in the doorway. "Do not touch anything, not in here."

She folded her arms across her chest. "I am not afraid of your father, Malfoy. Yes, do you hear me Lucius Malfoy? Are you listening too?" she called to the corners of the room. "Your mother is another thing. And if your aunt was still alive…" She shuddered.

"My father doesn't have the same kind of connection to the house that my mother does."

Hermione huffed. "Old-fashioned stereotypical nonsense."

"What I'm saying," Malfoy continued, "is that he won't be able to mount any new attacks on you based on the current state of things, but this study has always had old, cursed artifacts cached in it, so keep still."

She stepped into reading range of the titles in the bookcase, arms still folded to resist the temptation to start flipping through the Malfoy family's private restricted reading section. "The current state of affairs. You mean, us traveling together? Why would they be so fussy? I've traveled unchaperoned with boys before. I've always behaved myself. I should hope I know something about how not to end up in a stupid bed-sharing intrigue, or what have we."

Malfoy ceased rummaging through a desk drawer, pushed it shut with his knee, cramming envelopes and a trinket box into his pockets. "Fine, but even so, you ended up engaged to one of those boys."

She scoffed. "You can guarantee your parents we will not end this trip engaged."

"Spoken as if the fact that you're engaged to someone else makes this situation less of a scandal instead of more of a scandal."

"Scandal?"

"Yes, Granger. Don't act like you haven't thought it through. Don't act like you don't understand the scope of your own war hero, golden trio fame. You and I are a scandal."

She wheeled away from the bookcase to face him. "No, we are not. We are colleagues working on a project with nothing personal between us that isn't absolutely necessary."

He laughed, walking around the desk, toward her. "It doesn't matter how we feel about it. What makes something a scandal is how it looks to other people. And this - it looks scandalous." He snatched her hand and tucked it back into the crook of his arm. "I'm about to lead you upstairs to my bedroom, for the love of Boggarts."

She pulled her hand out of his. "What other people? No one knows we've gone but Ron, and he won't be announcing it all over."

"Won't he? You think Weasley went quietly? Just shrugged and went home for some quiet contemplation after I grabbed you, and you pitched his ring at him, and we vanished together?"

Malfoy was too close again and she stepped back, trying to sort out the jumbled memory of their leaving St. Mungo's. Ron had been yelling the last she saw him. He'd been attracting all sorts of attention without any thought to being in a public place and only half dressed. For all she knew, he might still be yelling, at this very moment.

Malfoy stepped back himself. "So understand that my mother hates this," he told her. "Understand that we can't stay here longer than a few minutes more. We have got to get away."


	11. Eleven

Upstairs in Malfoy Manor, Hermione Granger stood on the rug just inside Draco Malfoy's bedroom doorway, not daring to so much as lean against the wall, especially not in this area of his mother's house. As she waited for him to pack, he tried to explain to her who she was now.

"Your problem is, you're still thinking about your choices as if you're golden, like everything you do is right or will turn out right in the end."

He was not wrong.

"That isn't going to work in a project which you claim to want to be all about defiance and breaking some higher authority's rules. For that, you're going to have to start thinking more like a bad guy."

She hated it. The idea of transgression had been invigorating when she first thought of it, like the idea of visiting a dangerous, forbidden foreign country. But now that she had sneaked into that country, so to speak, she was disoriented - almost stupid, oblivious - like an alien who needed simple things explained to her by the natives. And when it came to acting the part of the bad guy, she knew no better acclimatized native than manor-raised Draco Malfoy.

Still, the idea left her sulking. "I prefer being good, being the hero."

He shook his head as he picked at his sock drawer. "Naw, anti-hero is best you can hope for now."

"Anti-hero," she repeated. "That must be just what it sounds like."

Malfoy shook his head again. "Honestly, how did a smart girl like you manage to get through Hogwarts without taking any literature classes? They should be mandatory. That's what my mother always - "

"It's not like I was lazing about," she interrupted. "I enrolled in so many courses it took a miracle for me to finish them all. I'd like to see you translate ancient runes, Draco Malfoy."

"Do you even read Muggle literature? Besides that sleeping fairy tale?"

"Who has the time when there's so much useful, factual information to be learned? And anyway, I do read stories, a bit. I did read - no. No, Malfoy, get up."

Maybe it was speaking the word "sleeping" so close to his bed, but as Hermione tried to remember the title of the last book of fiction she'd read, Malfoy let himself collapse face down onto the mattress, full length, sighing sleepily into the dusty covers.

"Get up, Malfoy. Don't tell me you're bewitched. You're going full sleeping beauty now, are you?"

He rolled onto his back. "No, Granger. But I am a healthy young man who likes a good sleep every once in a while. It's been over two years." He sat up, petting the top of his bed like a favourite cat.

She scoffed. "Healthy…"

Abruptly, he was on his feet, gathering his bag and throwing a coat over his shoulders. "Do you smell that?"

She breathed deeply. The room smelled of stone-ground dust and something warmly, lushly human that must have been related to Malfoy himself. It wasn't unpleasant but something in her shrank from it, scared.

It wasn't what he meant. "That smell like fresh raw vegetables, and grass," he went on, "getting more and more like flowers every second."

She breathed again and there it was - high and sweet, like perfume. The room was filling with a strong scent of narcissus. They reached for each other's hands, and fled.

\---------------------------

Safely outside the gates of Malfoy Manor, they negotiated the terms of their trip to Swindon, the nearest place they could get the Muggle mobile device they needed to pinpoint the city where Wendell and Monika Wilkins had made their new home. Since Hermione had never visited this part of the country before, they agreed to side-along apparate again, to a large public garden where someone suddenly noticing a pair of handsome young people lying in the grass would think nothing of it all.

"Fine, Malfoy, you can lead. You have my consent. If - IF you don't LEAD lead."

"What're you on about?"

"Well, you can steer us on our way, but let me steady us. You might do better. And we might land on our feet if we go about it more - equally."

He ran his hands through his hair, nodding. "Right."

"Don't be nervous," she said. "But don't overpower."

"I'm not nervous. And I won't overpower."

"Good."

"Good."

More nodding. "Erm," he held out his hand. She was slow in taking it. So slow he let his hand fall back to his side, scoffing. "Why're you stood there, glaring at me like I'm jinxed, like we haven't spent most of the day hand-in-hand, all over the house, hiding you from my mother?"

She couldn't explain it herself. Maybe it was his earlier mention of the word "scandal" between them, but she was coming out of her fog of alienation, seeing again, understanding what they would look like in the Swindon park to any wizards or witches who happened to be there. But appearing in public was a step on the road to her parents, and it had to be taken.

Patience was near the top of a long list of virtues no one had ever bothered to cultivate in young Draco Malfoy, and he clamped an arm around Hermione Granger's waist, looked her in the eyes when she turned, and told her, "Steady." With that, they were gone.

Their landing in the Swindon gardens was a stagger, not a fall, successful, yet Malfoy still came out of it panting, bending to sit on the grass, his head in his hands. "Better," he breathed. "Getting better."

While he dealt with the last of his vertigo, Hermione was taking charge, installing him under a tree, telling him she would walk to the high street to find a mobile shop. "Use your bracelet to alert me if there's trouble. Otherwise, just sit here and try to look like a harmless, inconspicuous young scholar enjoying a book, or something." She opened her bag to find the necessary prop.

"No need," he said. "I've got my own book in my bag - some actual literature. Don't look so surprised, Granger."

She stood back a little, watching as he sorted himself with a book under a sycamore. As an enemy, he had always been easy to track, coloured in black and shining white. As an ally, she realized, he was not easy to hide. It wasn't just the sharpness and contrast in his looks, it was the way he carried himself - something about the expression on his face. "No, it's wrong," she said. "Stop looking like everyone's looking at you. It just makes them do it more."

He didn't glance up from the book. "How'd that go again, Granger? About the drug addicted pop star?" He turned a page. "There's nothing for it. Why are you still here? Go get the - thing."

She was back in an hour with a tiny black looking glass that glowed with words when she touched it. Malfoy eyed it over the top of his book. "You work it," he said. "I've been sat here for an hour watching the Muggles go by with them. They carry them in their hands like drawn wands that only work while they're looking at them."

Hermione laughed. "You should see them when they can't find them. It's exactly like a wizard looking for a lost wand. So frantic."

"Your parents have one?"

"Yes, each of them does. I had to factor their phones into my memory charm. Made it quite a bit more complicated."

He closed the book and sat forward. He never would have thought of a detail like that. It was so specific and technical. For the first time, he understood something of the fear she must feel whenever she thought of undoing this untried, experimental spell she'd cast on the two people in the world who meant the most to her. Shame she didn't rehearse it on Weasley first instead - awful shame.

"Ask it," he said. "Ask it where they are."

A search of the Australian Dental Association membership rolls turned up no results: none for the names W or M Wilkins, none at all for the name Granger.

"Maybe they're still in Britain. Maybe they forgot me but never left, and it was all for nothing."

No results found.

Relieved, she began a search of the rest of the English-speaking world.

Ireland: no results found. South Africa: no results found. Belize, Nigeria, Fiji: no results found.

Malfoy raised his eyebrows. "They wouldn't have gone to America, would they?"

United States of America: no results found.

"Stupid Muggle-wand," he said. "It's broken. Useless."

"Oh, stop. There are loads more dental associations to check. What about Canada?"

"You already said they didn't go there."

"No, I said I hadn't tried to send them there. They might have chosen it for themselves. I mean," she stammered, "How can I say what they'd do? I don't really know Wendell and Monika Wilkins, do I? The world-traveling childfree professional couple. They could be doing dental surgeries in Spanish in Argentina, for all I know."

She fell silent, getting stalled that way long enough for Malfoy to become strangely irritated. "Or you could just try searching Canada," he said.

She found the web-page of the Canadian Dental Association, typed the name Monika Wilkins into the search bar. The screen went white, lagging as it refreshed.

Malfoy eased the phone out of her hand as she waited. "Let me read the results this time, yeah?" He sat back. "Monika Wilkins, Wilkins Family Dentistry, 9 Cole Haven Road, Halifax County, Nova Scotia, Canada."

Everyone in the park startled when Hermione screamed and threw her arms in the air. By the time they had turned to look in her direction, both of her arms were around Malfoy's neck and she was laughing loudly in his ear.

"Look at 'im, gettin' ingaged out in the open on a nice sunny day," a lady said to her little granddaughter over the top of a pushchair. "Isn't that dreamy, lovey? Ay!" she called across the green. "All the best to ye's both!"

Malfoy tried to nod back but Hermione was still jumping, still holding him around the neck. "Granger," he hissed, pulling at her arms. "Granger - scandal."

Like magic, she let go at the sound of the word, but she kept up her laughter. Her parents were all but found. "Thank you, Muggle-wand," she said, still ecstatic enough to smack a kiss against the shining surface of the phone.

Malfoy faked a retch. "Granger, watch your mouth."

\------------------------

This day, which had begun before dawn in their rooms in St. Mungo's, was finally coming to an end. On the grass under a Sycamore tree in a Swindon park, Hermione stretched and looked west, to the sunset, to the point of the compass where she would find her parents. She and Draco Malfoy had spent a dull afternoon researching travel plans, the Wilkins's dental office, its surrounding town. They'd eaten from Narcissa Malfoy's cans, Malfoy's back turned to her, and generally tried not to attract any attention to themselves.

The light was dimming to blue when Malfoy said, "We can't go back to the manor tonight. Mother's had all day to prepare something for you. I'd have to sit up on watch all night to keep you safe. Either that or - well, you've already gone and bragged about how you're not about to be caught in any bed-sharing…"

She swatted his arm as she sat up in the grass. "I don't suppose there's anywhere in greater Swindon to pitch a tent then."

"No, we're going to need to rent a pair of rooms, like a pair of Muggles, or else -- scandal."

It was truly dark when they found an inn and were standing on a landing in front of Hermione's door. Malfoy pointed up the stairwell. "I'm just there…"

"Yes, the bracelets - in case, yeah…"

"Right."

"Thank you," she blurted, "for everything today. It wasn't easy and I want to thank you, Malfoy - "

Her bag was buzzing, or more properly, wheezing. From its depths, her Communication Compact, the one inscribed with the initials R & H, was signalling her. Still looking up at Draco Malfoy, her face flushed red. She was fumbling with the Muggle key the innkeeper had given her when, without a word, Malfoy turned and walked up the stairs to his own room. She burst through the door, clawing at her bag, anxious, but not ready to face Ronald Weasley.


	12. Twelve

Through the mirrors of their Communication Compacts, Ron was trying to smile at his fiancee. But he looked sick. And he looked, Hermione thought for the first time, like he needed an eyebrow pencil. She shook her head, forcing her attention to the words he was saying. They were tepid and strange, like he had learned them by heart from a script someone else had written. But what would have been the right thing for him to say to her this evening? Perhaps the script was as good as anything.

His speech was winding down. "...so I will remain your absent partner on your journey. This is the first of my cheerful, loving daily messages to you, until we meet again." He stopped, his posture slackening. "How was that? Berlant came up with most of that. So it should have been alright, yeah?"

"You talked to Dr. Berlant about all this? Who else did you talk to?"

"Well, George, Mum, Ginny, Harry…"

It was just their inner circle.

"The porters at the hospital, those nurses…"

Their inner circle and discreet medical professionals at the hospital.

"Made a bit of a show of myself though, what with the shock, and then there was the old bloke marching around the hospital in Malfoy's clothes all day. The other patients figured out who 'Jean' really was pretty soon after seeing me getting hauled around. Don't be mad, we can't really blame them for being excited and talking about it. Nothing ever happens up there. The papers have been owling everyone here at home all night for reactions, but no one's talking to them, of course. Probably won't be able to open the store for a day or two."

She groaned into her hands. "Ronald, I am so sorry."

"Then just come home."

"No. No, let's not go over this again."

"No need, no need. Dr. Berlant explained it all to me. Absent partner, loving, cheerful, gutted. That's me."

Berlant knew her patient well. If Hermione allowed Ron to make contact with her like this every day, she'd be curled beneath a quilt at the Burrow with him within a week.

"Stop, Ronald," she said. "Don't do this. Don't dutifully sit there waiting, it holds back everything I'm trying to accomplish."

"Hermione-"

"We can start again when I've finished this project, one way or another. But I can't do this with you hanging on so tightly."

He sat back, where she could see his whole torso in the glass, showing her his hands, holding nothing. "Go," he said. "Go on and go. It doesn't change anything I feel, but go. I love you, Hermione. I'd do anything for you. I'd even do this."

Her eyes were clenched tight against her tears. He was quiet, waiting for her to echo back his 'I love you.' And heaven knew she loved him - loved his warm body on cold mornings, his permanence in her history, loved him as if her ties to every other human being she could claim to love depended on her maintaining her happy connection to him. It wasn't fair. Before her parents had left, love existed in the universe for Hermione Granger independently of Ron Weasley. And she had to make it true again, even if there was no script for it anywhere. Rewriting - this was all a rewriting.

She was cold, rubbing her palms against her arms, from elbow to wrist, stoking her own warmth and strength as she told him. "I'm sorry Ronald, you darling boy. Until we meet again, goodbye." She snapped the Compact closed.

There was a sound outside her door like someone had dropped a load of tools down the stairs while coughing out "alohomora" and Malfoy was in her room, disheveled and demanding, "What? What is it?"

"Nothing, why are you - "

"The bracelet. You touched it, you called."

She looked down at her hand, clamped around her opposite wrist, palm pushed against her St. Mungo's hospital bracelet. "Oh, I didn't - didn't mean to at any rate. I was just overwhelmed talking to Ron."

He rolled his eyes dramatically enough for his entire head to swivel. "Let me get some sleep, would you Granger?"

"Sorry. And you were right," she called to Malfoy as he was retreating behind her closing door. "You were right about the scandal. It's all a mess over at the hospital, and at the Burrow."

"Well, of course."

"And I've told Ron that, for now, he doesn't need to worry about me. He's not responsible for me."

Malfoy stepped back into the room, a flush of pink across his cheeks. "Yeah, well that makes two of us. When my house was hunting you, I felt compelled to intervene. It was Malfoy magic, even if it wasn't exactly mine. But don't get used to it. Now that we're clear of the manor, I'm claiming that equal partnership I was promised when I agreed to all of this."

She took a step toward him, brow furrowed. "Have it. I never intended anything less than independent collaboration."

"Then snap out of it, Granger. Pay attention to our surroundings. Shape up. Read a real book."

"I am an extremely accomplished reader!"

"Then be as bright as everyone tells us you are. Have a care."

"I'm trying, Malfoy." She swore at him. "I am trying, but I'm sick. That's why I was at St. Mungo's. That's why - oh, nevermind."

She sat down hard on the edge of her bed, easily resuming her crying.

He groaned, hating it. "Look, just - get some rest, yeah?"

Outside her door, Draco Malfoy went down the stairs instead of up, out into the streets and Swindon's weekday nightlife. The high street was all but empty, nothing open but a chemist, a liquor store, and greasy kebab shop where people ordered food at a window and disappeared to eat it alone. Perfect. Connecting with hunger again was a healthy sign. Maybe it was a benefit from eating his mother's cooking after so long, canned and preserved for years though it was. He leaned against a bus bench and ate away at the kebab, the sound of trains rumbling through the town, going to and from London masking the nearly unbearable sound of his teeth and jaws working.

He needed his own advice. He had to stop thinking like a hospital patient and start thinking with coolness and calculation again. With Granger flagging the way she was, it might be the only chance they had to keep this up all the way to Canada.

Play nicely, Draco. Mother - what had she been playing at in the manor today? Why come out fully hostile toward Granger? Surely his parents weren't they still bent on that purity nonsense-that flimsy, sickening excuse for grasping at other people's wealth, status, and power. Those conjurings today, the flowers and perfumes - what were they meant to tell him, to force him toward? Entertaining the idea that they might not have been attacks would have been too risky so he'd cut off his mother's advances as soon as he sensed them. But maybe there was more to them, machinations he still couldn't see through, not in this state of mind.

He wiped his face and hands on a paper napkin, disgusted at the smell of food on his skin. His apparation legs were returning to their normal steadiness. His third trip should be perfectly normal, even solo. He could go back to the manor alone, while Granger slept, and let his parents reach him, find out their schemes if it was for no purpose other than to inoculate himself against them, making sure he didn't become their little white pawn again. He'd put it off contacting them long enough. Wasn't that what Berlant had been trying to tell him? What it was all coming down to, what was forcing the crisis, was the question of whether his mother had been trying to separate him from Granger, or push them together, rehabilitating the damaged Malfoy name through an alliance with British wizarding society's favourite Muggle-born hero, Hermione Granger.

Throwing the rest of his food into the bin he stood up quickly, wand ready. And then his still-recovering mind switched, as it often did, to somewhere else entirely. He saw himself back in Granger's room at the inn, heard her swearing at him-not a mild one either, none of that Weasley "bloody hell" nonsense. She was beyond that. No one would believe him if he told them what she'd said, and the thought made him laugh - laugh until he was groaning again.

This broken person crying in the inn was a version of Hermione Granger only he knew. She existed in a world with no one in it to care for her but him. He was responsible for her, bound by some kind of human ethic he didn't ask for and could not yet dismiss. Maybe this feeling was nothing more than the lasting effects of the Innocentia spell showing themselves to be more powerful than he'd known. Whatever it was, Malfoy pulled at the hair at his temples, turned on the sidewalk, and walked back to the inn.

The sound of her sniffling was still audible from the landing as he climbed the stairs to his room. He paused, felt for a rectangular lump in his jacket pocket, and knocked at her door.

She opened it hardly at all, greeting him through the crack with, "You've been eating."

He wiped at his face again, frowning, then reaching into his jacket pocket. "Read this," he said, passing her a thin book.

"Hamlet?" she read from the spine. "You're reading Muggle literature?"

"Shakespeare is not a Muggle, obviously. Have you read this, Granger? Have you read anything but encyclopedia and dictionaries?"

She'd been waiting to tell him. "Yes, as a matter of fact, I've read some Austen, that one Bronte, Huxley..."

He rolled his eyes. "Read this. Read it all. It's a tragedy about parents. It won't make you feel better, but it'll help you remember how the world works, which will do us all good."

\---------------------

George forced his way through Ron's bedroom door, ready to break up what sounded like a fight. Instead, he found Ron furiously packing his clothing into a bag.

"Oh no," George drawled. "He's heading off to bring back the near-missus."

Ron huffed over a pile of clean underwear. "Well, I can't show my face in the shop until the reporters clear off."

"It'll just be a few days."

"I can't go to Malfoy Manor to punch his face up."

"Arguable."

"And I can't sit here, knitting with Mum."

George shrugged. "Sounds nice to me."

Ron let out a long breath. "So I'm heading them off."

George shook his head. "Off? Whaddya mean?"

From the pile of boxer shorts, Rob had found what he was looking for: a pair of baggy, barely used swimming trunks. "What do you think I mean? Where do you think a man in my position would be heading? I am going to Australia."


	13. Thirteen

All morning, inside a Muggle library, they bored each other, arguing back and forth over travel plans. Each of them already had a valid passport, complete with the "-W" noted at the end of their serial numbers to show their statuses as wizard or witch. What remained to be decided was whether they would travel through the magical international transport system or through a Muggle airline.

Malfoy, of course, argued for the magical system, finding passage on trans-Atlantic ships something like the Durmstrang Institute had used to convey their contingent from Bulgaria to Hogwarts, only without all the medieval flair and secrecy. "It's how my family did all our international travel. It's civilized and safe - not driven by exploding fuel a kilometer into the sky, like those Muggle machines."

"Airplanes, Malfoy. They're smelly and cramped but they're safe - enough."

"I don't understand your reluctance," he went on. "It's not like we're fugitives. We've broken no laws. We can come and go through the international transport systems as we please, like anyone can."

He continued to argue the point until they managed to summon a morning edition of the Daily Prophet. There it was, written up in the fine style of Rita Skeeter's protege, Almun Rentz, a story pieced together from their fellow patients at St. Mungo's. Rentz was calling it the "Gralfoy Affair." The story filled the entire lower half of the fourth page, accompanied by an outdated promotional photo of Ron smiling in front of his shop captioned "It's no joke! Weasley jilted for bad bloke."

Hermione folded the newspaper into her bag. "You're right, Malfoy, it's not like they could stop us. But what a nightmare it's going to be, stepping up to a transport counter to identify ourselves as the Gralfoy Affair, and then spending the entire voyage as scandal incarnate."

He blew his hair upward, out of his face. "We could still go separately. That could help dispel some of the gossip. Might be good, actually."

She said nothing, her shoulders rounding, her head bowing forward slightly, the weight of a lonely passage across the north Atlantic pressing on her with the very mention of it. The weight settled on her back, pressing down with that now familiar crush, each breath harder to take than the last one. Her hand clamped the arm of Malfoy's chair.

"What? Oh, honestly Granger, breathe. Breathe with me."

"S-sorry," she gasped.

"Leave it, Granger, just - look at me. Calm down. Breathe. We won't send you alone."

\---------------------------

On the outskirts of greater London, in Gatwick Airport, the crowds that had been merely close on the train from Swindon began to squeeze - throngs of Muggles in sandals, wheeling their cases, bumping them against each other's cold bare ankles. Malfoy looked sick as Hermione pulled him out of a queue for the lifts and into a stairwell they could climb easily carrying nothing but their extended bags. His extension was not undetectable - that would have taken more care and time - but it wouldn't matter here.

"You need to fix your face," she told him as they climbed. "If you can sustain a spell to magically cloak most of the belongings in your bag, how much harder can it be for you to smile so the security officers don't worry and stop you with a bunch of probing questions?"

He did nothing to prove to her he could smile. "I prefer to leave my mouth closed in here. It's rank and awful, like a cattle auction."

"That's not the Muggles's fault. They're doing their best."

"Doesn't mean I can't hate it."

They emerged at the top of the stairs in a vast but crowded area full of more queues and cases. He glanced at her. "You're not feeling panicky here?"

"No, it's rather nostalgic. Has me remembering good times with my parents, on holiday. Just don't leave me alone." She caught him by the sleeve, dragging him toward the longest, densest queue in the building.

His frown deepened. "This has to get worse before it gets better, doesn't it?"

"Yes. Now where's your wand?" She patted the outsides of his jacket, feeling for it as he raised his hands to hold her off.

"Granger, stop. It's in the bag already. Why does this process have to involve everyone touching me?"

She stood on tiptoe, craning her neck to see the security checkpoint at the head of the queue. "They haven't even begun to touch you, Malfoy. And if you don't want those nice people in uniforms to feel you all over, you really must listen to me and fix your miserable face."

"I've never been able to do that. Made my father livid." He shuddered with the memory of - something.

Hermione hung her head, sighed at her shoes. It was true. Everything he felt was always broadcast on his face. It was another one of the things that made him a good enemy but a difficult ally. To get 'round it would require extreme measures. "Alright, Malfoy. I am about to share with you a Granger family secret, our method for keeping a pleasant exterior under unpleasant circumstances. Dentists need to be expert at that kind of thing. I will show you what my mother used to do to keep me from frowning when I needed to be sweet."

His eyes narrowed. "Sweet? What could - "

In that swift instant, she had hopped toward him and smacked a kiss against his cheek with all the ardor she had used to kiss her mobile phone the day before, with all the perfunctoriness she used to give Charlie and Percy their New Year's kisses every year. It was nothing. But...

"What the hell, woman?"

She fell back, laughing at him. "There! Now when you're stood in front of the security officers, just bring back to mind how silly and surprised you feel right now, and your gloomy face should clear right up. Maybe not exactly smiling but slightly confused is a rather benign look, better than scowling at any rate, and - no, Malfoy, not like that."

He looked beyond silly, well beyond confused, positively shocked, scrubbing his thumb against his cheek.

"Oh, stop. It was perfectly dry."

"It wasn't and - Granger, you don't just up and do that."

She had pulled a handkerchief out of her bag, coming at him again to dab his face. "Pardon me, Malfoy. I'm sorry. Pardon me."

But the fact was, at the security counter, Draco Malfoy succeeded in not scowling. Ahead of him in the queue, an officer scanned the bars and blocks on Hermione's passport. The machine beeped happily and she walked through the metal detector to the secured side of the airport. Malfoy nodded blandly as he handed his own passport to the official. The machine responded with a deeper beep, long and morose.

"What's all this?" a tall man in a white shirt-ed uniform instead of the typical blue one asked.

"He's on some list," a man in a blue shirt answered. "And it won't tell me which one. Just says to call upstairs."

"Odd. Right. Come this way, sir."

"Oh," Malfoy stammered. "Just a moment, please. I need to tell - " He pointed through the scanners, to where Hermione stood, head bent over her open bag.

"It that your girlfriend there?"

"Er - sure. Can I just - "

"Yes, don't worry about that, sir. We'll inform her. Come this way, without any trouble, if you please."

Malfoy was taken through a steel, windowless door in an adjacent wall, into a small room made of breezeblock painted the colour of curdled cream. Seated at an empty table, he waited, eyes on the door he'd come through - the one Hermione had not followed him through. By another door, another officer entered, checking over his shoulder before whisking a wand from his coat with a flourish to close them both inside. "Mr. Draco Malfoy," he said. "I am Sargent Harv, officer of the Ministry of Magic, Department of Magical Transport, Gatwick International."

Malfoy slumped forward onto the table with relief. "Yes, nice to meet you. There's some kind of mistake. I'm just off to Canada."

"Yes, yes," Harv began, "this may well be nothing but an oversight. However, we are required to investigate when the system flags a passport. It seems in the days following, well, all the unpleasantness, your entire family was placed on a no-fly list. No international airborne conveyances of any kind, magical or not."

"Yes, that's correct, but it was meant to lapse following our rehabilitation. And I've served a psychiatric sentence at St. Mungo's, not a criminal one. Even that's been expired for almost a month."

Sargent Harv nodded. "Right, right then. Just hand over your discharge papers from the hospital and we'll take you back to the head of the queue."

Malfoy's face blanched even whiter. His papers were still in a file at St. Mungo's.

"No papers, Mr. Malfoy? Well, that does complicate things."

Knocking sounded at the door, regular at first but then layered over with another higher, faster knock that did not abate until Harv rose and opened the door by hand. Outside was the tall blue-shirted guard and at his elbow, Hermione.

Before anyone else could speak, she was calling out to Malfoy. "There you are, darling, I was frantic when I couldn't find you and the nice officer brought me here. Is everything quite alright?"

Malfoy gaped at her from the table as Harv inspected her passport, humming gravely at the "-W" status, dismissing the blue-shirt, and shutting the door. She crossed the floor in a single, giant step, dropping an arm around Malfoy's shoulders.

"This is your traveling companion, Mr. Malfoy?"

He looked up at her, at her hand closed over the curve of his shoulder, stunned as she chattered to the official. "Yes, of course," she said. "We're on our way to Canada to introduce Draco to my parents. Poor darling was so nervous he might have forgotten to bring some of our documentation. Can't say I blame him. But is everything alright, sir? Can I help you?"

Harv blinked. "Sorry, Miss, how are you involved with Mr. Malfoy?"

"I'm his fiancee," she said, squeezing the stiff angle of Malfoy's shoulders against her hip. "Didn't you know? No, it's nice to meet someone with too much sense to read the gossip pages. Well done, sir."

"Well, I'm afraid your trip will have to be postponed until after Mr. Malfoy has brought a successful application to have his name expunged from our no-fly list. Very sorry, Miss - what was it again?"

"Granger," she over-articulated. "I'm Hermione Granger. It's nice to meet you. May I show you something?"

He nodded and she let go of Malfoy to reach into her bag for the morning newspaper, spreading it out on the table, open to page four.

"Oh, this is you," Harv sang. "The Gralfoy Affair, yes, my daughters have been following it. And here you are, in our airport, on my watch. Aren't you a handsome pair?"

She took a step back, encouraging him to admire them, closing her hand around Malfoy's. He spread his fingers, lacing them between hers, holding tightly.

Sargent Harv cleared his throat. "Quite the scandal though, yeah? But what is it they say? The heart wants what it wants, or something? Yes, it's all here in the newspaper. Look at that. Well, I suppose you can be on your way. Just between us, we'll consider this newspaper your hospital discharge papers. But could I trouble you for one small wish, from a doting father of a houseful of girls?"

He produced a quill and smiled on as Hermione and Malfoy signed their autographs to page four.

The inside of the Muggle airplane was huge but more crowded than anywhere they'd been yet. Malfoy sat in the dark, his forehead pressed against a cold, tiny window overlooking a vast blackness. The sea must be below them but it had disappeared beneath white clouds hours ago, before everything turned dark. Women with a huge rolling cabinet kept passing by, handing him food impossible to eat in a space so small.

The noise, the slowness of their crawl through the air, the trapped breaths of hundreds of other people - how could Granger not be panicking here? Instead she was sleeping in the seat next to him, a small pillow between her head and his shoulder. If he pushed her away, she'd slump over to sleep on the person on the other side of them, a woman who'd been sitting with a book bent around her nose.

While Hermione slept, Malfoy risked raising his hand to touch his cheek again, where she'd kissed him. Maybe she had spent years living in the small house of a large family, all of them clambering over each other like puppies, and thought nothing of casual physical contact. He, on the other hand, had spent most of his life in the large house of a small family, with only his mother and Aunt Bella pressing kisses against his face. For him, this playful kiss from a peer had been rare and strange. His pulse quickened just remembering something Granger would likely never think of again.

And then there was that business about the Gralfoy Affair in the interrogation room. Hermione's part of it had all been an act - and not even a good one. But the show had settled into him as well, rooted inside his rib-cage, an aching lightness. He clenched his hand into a fist, closed it against the memory of her fingers between his. In that moment, he had been so grateful for his rescue he had wanted her close - not just as a gesture for the benefit of the watching Ministry official but for someone else, for himself.

He turned in his seat, closer to the window, inadvertently dislodging her pillow so her head bobbed forward. She rubbed her eyes and she re-situated herself. "Malfoy what do they mean, calling it the Gralfoy Affair rather than the Malger Affair?"

In the darkness, he smiled against the airplane window. "Go back to sleep."


	14. Fourteen

The light was barely strong enough for Hermione to be able to read the words in the paperback edition of Hamlet that Malfoy had lent her. He slumped, asleep, his head propped in the well of the airplane window, a pile of vacuum sealed biscuits and pretzels in his lap. Pausing her reading to watch the cloud of his breath form and re-form on the Plexi-glass window pane, she smirked, imagining that the t-shirt underneath his jacket might have said "O, that this too sullied flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into dew." Poor little prince, crammed into economy class airplane seats.

He twitched awake when the flight attendants clicked on the announcement system, describing the weather and the time at the Halifax International Airport below. They were beginning again, the same speech but spoken in French, as he sat up, rubbing his head. Through the window, they could see nothing but white fog, a heavy cloud continuing all the way to the surface of the tarmac. They landed not in view of the sea, but in trees - dark spruce trees tipping west, away from the wind coming relentlessly off the Atlantic.

In an airport, tiny compared to anything they knew from Europe, Hermione used the Muggle-wand to make arrangements for them to stay in a large orange motel on the outskirts of the city. Their room was conventional, American-style though not American, two large beds in a small, undivided space - more room than they needed, but also not nearly enough.

"Well, I'm in a bad mood," Hermione began, "because I didn't expect this place to be so populated. I don't know what I was imagining but it wasn't a proper city of nothing but petrol stations and doughnut shops, far as the eye can see."

"Trees," he added. "Don't forget the trees."

Yes, between the fog and the trees and the sea which she could smell but not see, Hermione felt like she couldn't find anything in this place. And since the trip was primarily a finding mission, it was raising panic.

As for Malfoy, he was in a bad mood because he was famished. "You've eaten nothing since Swindon this morning, haven't you," she accused him.

"I'll get something later."

She folded her arms, watching him slide his jacket from his too-lean arms. "Malfoy, this has to end. You need to go back to eating with other people. It's healthy for all sorts of reasons besides nutritional ones."

"My nutrition is fine - better, at any rate." He was kicking his shoes off, pulling back the hotel bedspread. "I'll sleep while you go eat. Then we'll trade off."

She tugged at the covers he'd just pulled over himself. "Come on, let's eat together. We'll never accomplish anything if we stagger our daily routines like that. We have to stay in sync, like they had us at the hospital."

"I don't see why." He had rolled into bed, turning his back to her.

She took a deep breath. "I know what this is, Malfoy. This isn't just jet-lag, this is trauma."

He said nothing, motionless in his bed.

She sat down on her own bed, facing his back. "What happened to you? Why won't you let anyone see you eat?"

"Leave it, Granger."

She scoffed. "Like I left the Innocentia spell? Look Malfoy, I can help you, perhaps better than anyone. I've done it before."

His voice was rising. "That was spell management. This food issue is you going power mad, my own personal Dr. Berlant, and I won't have it."

Something flew across the room, summoned out of Hermione's bag to hit Malfoy him in the back, bouncing onto the floor beside his bed. He turned over to glare at it: his battered, paperback copy of Hamlet.

"Right," she was saying. "I am not your Ophelia. My story is not one about following you around while you hurt, getting prettily flustered by it all, never saying more than a line or two, waiting for you to insult me and make me insane. That story is bollocks."

"What're you on about, Granger?"

She crossed her arms. "I am not awed by your pain, Malfoy. We're all hurt. But the war is over and each of us has to confront our trauma and move on. That's why we're - "

"Not awed by my pain?" He was sitting up in bed now, snarling. "It's all the same for everyone involved in the war, is it?"

She started to speak again but he was talking over her, deep and loud. "True enough, you are not Ophelia. No, but I'll talk to you like I'm a madman anyway. I don't need your awe but I will tell you about the last meal I had in the company of other people. And once I start, I warn you, I won't stop."

Sitting on the edge of his bed, he told her everything about the night shortly before the Ministry fell, when the Dark Lord assembled his highest-ranking Death Eaters in the dining hall of Malfoy Manor. He told her how their teacher, Professor Burbage, had been suspended over the long, black table until, with his own father's wand, she was put to death and then eaten by Nagini the snake as they were all seated at the table, watching.

When it was announced that Professor Burbage had resigned, Hermione had believed with the rest of the Order of the Phoenix that she had been killed, but she hadn't known it had been like this. She gasped at the news, sinking to her knees on the carpet between their beds.

Malfoy fought onward, telling the story through gritted teeth, shaking where he sat on the edge of the bed. She gathered his quaking hands between hers. They were slick with cold sweat, clamping around hers as he spoke.

"When it was over, the great hideous thing was stretched and bloated, all uncoiled along our table. And the Dark Lord laughed about how it couldn't slither an inch so soon after a big meal. We all had to laugh too. Mother looked at me, with just a look begging me to laugh along. He ordered the serving elves not to lay hand or spell on the snake. Forced them to just serve everyone supper over and around its body while it slept, digesting."

At this, he choked out a sob, falling forward. She rose up on her knees to catch his head against her shoulder, shushing him, rocking gently as his tears wet the skin of her neck.

"No, I said I wouldn't stop," he said through his sobs. "I was too sick to eat with them, but my mother wouldn't excuse me. She squeezed my knee underneath the table and gave me that look of begging again - pleading with me for all of our lives, as if it was up to me, as if it was ME who was responsible for doing this to HER."

He was almost shouting against Hermione's neck, and since at that moment she couldn't muffle him with a spell, she reached her arms around him, pulling him closer, turning her head to sigh into his ear.

He quieted enough to go on. "'Death Eater' is not a metaphor. We had to eat, and I did."

There had been nothing more to say. Hermione listened to Draco Malfoy's story, propped him up while he cried, and eased him back into his bed when he finished, pulling the blankets to his chin, brushing his hair out of his closed eyes.

He was awake again, clean and dressed after a shower, when she returned to the room with food for both of them, bready sandwiches and paper cups of thick soup. His jaw clenched as she laid the tiny motel table for two.

With no fanfare, no browbeating, she simply touched the back of an empty chair. "Come and eat with me, Malfoy. It's alright."

He sighed, dropped the towel from his damp hair, and took his seat at the table.


	15. Fifteen

No more stalling, no more preliminary preparations. It was time for Hermione to pay a visit to Wilkins Family Dentistry. Neither she nor Malfoy had ever seen the place before, making apparation next to impossible. Instead, they used the driver's license Monika and Wendell had insisted she get back when they were the Grangers, rented a car, and drove out of the city into Halifax County, rolling along the wrong side of narrow, twisting roads. The countryside had the rough beauty the British expect and admire overseas, wildflowers on the roadsides, grey slate faces breaking through moss, and so many trees.

They obeyed the sweet lady's voice speaking driving directions out of the Muggle-wand, until the voice told them to stop inside a small town called Upper Raleigh, outside a pink stucco building, the Wilkins's clinic.

"I don't understand it," Malfoy said, reading the sign mounted on the building. "Why do they have separate doctors just for teeth? Do Muggles not consider teeth part of the body?"

"Never mind that, Malfoy. And don't get my father started on it. Where's your wand? Clean your teeth. Your appointment is in ten minutes."

"My appointment? You're the one who needs to talk to them."

"Well, that's the thing about dentist appointments, Malfoy. It's impossible for patients to talk. We need to be clever," she said. At the door of the building she took his arm, leading him toward the reception desk.

"Why do you need to hold me up?" he asked. "Am I meant to be unwell?"

"No, you're meant to be anxious, and reluctant."

He raised an eyebrow. "Should I make a show of resisting?"

"No, of course not." She said nothing of it, but it was herself she was holding up with Malfoy's arm, clinging to it as they stepped into the clinic and the smell of the place engulfed them. The scent of latex, antiseptics, artificial fruit and peppermint - this was her parents' smell.

It might have been overwhelming if Malfoy wasn't such a prat. He was asking, "What about my face, is it right? Not too miserable? You don't need to - you know - again?" He tapped his own cheek, bending slightly toward her.

"No, Malfoy. If we use the secret Granger family method too much, it'll stop working - Hello!" she was singing to the lady behind the counter. "Draco Malfoy for Dr. Monika, please."

They waited in a dental exam room, Malfoy tense, seated in the apparatus he was calling the Azkaban armchair, and Hermione pacing in the metre square of floor left open in the space. The clinic was busy, noisy with suction and running water, whirring unseen machinery it was best Malfoy didn't understand. Hermione strained to discern voices in the racket.

"Granger," Malfoy said, snagging her wrist to try to stop her pacing. "Take a deep breath. You're just going to see her and talk a little. It's not like much can go wrong. We're just evaluating where your spell has left them so we can decide on a next step."

Hermione blew out a breath. "I should have booked with my dad. Less emotional. No, harder to read. No - I don't know."

A laugh rang out from just outside the exam area. It was her. She was coming.

"Breathe, Granger."

Monika Wilkins rounded the corner, eyes down, reading a chart labeled with Malfoy's very odd name, singing out in exactly the same cadence Hermione had used to greet the receptionist, "Hello!"

Malfoy kept his hold on Hermione's wrist, his grip tightening at the sound of Monika's voice. The doctor was talking quickly, eyes still down, reading from the chart. "Draco, coming to us from Wiltshire. Lovely to meet you," she said, glancing up from the paper, extending a hand in greeting, but finding Malfoy already holding someone else's hand. "Oh," she said, "you've brought a friend."

"I'm Hermione," she blurted. "Hermione Granger. We're in Canada to meet my - my parents."

The explanation was not at all appropriate. Hermione stood blinking at Dr. Monika, reeling with the lack of feeling in the stare her mother returned. In this respect, at any rate, the memory charm was heartbreakingly good. The doctor ducked her head to have a better look at the patient, trying to make sense of the room. "Draco, yeah? What kind of name is that? Does he speak no English?"

Hermione laughed too loudly. "His English is beautiful. He's just very nervous - phobic, almost - and didn't want to be here alone. Sorry - I'll just - sit over there."

"Alright, Draco, very common to have some nerves but you've nothing to worry about. Hermione, is it, you can go 'round the other side and get hold of his hand from there. Now then, open up. Goodness, you are tense. A little wider. Some light, distracting conversation, please, Hermione. There's a good friend."

The authority, the conciliation in Dr. Monika's dentist voice was not unlike a motherly tone, and it left Hermione sputtering, unable to begin, and she heard her own patient kind of impatience in the doctor's sigh as Monika took control of the light conversation herself. "Meeting the parents, yeah? In advance of a wedding, I reckon?"

"Yes, wedding," Hermione choked.

"Easy, Draco," the doctor said when he jumped. "Nothing to be nervous about. Your teeth are remarkable. Not a filling in them, even at your age. See, nothing to worry about at all. Though it does look like you've still got all your wisdom teeth. Might become a problem so I'd suggest extracting them before it devolves into a crisis." She sat back and Hermione noticed something that surprised her. Dr. Monika wore a silver cross around her neck - a large one, verging on costume sized. Had she been attacked by vampires?

The doctor was standing up. "I'm going to send one of my technicians in to take some x-rays, and then we'll talk about those wisdom teeth once I've had a proper look at them. Won't be a moment."

She was gone, leaving Hermione to deflate where she stood and Malfoy to sit up straight in the Azkaban armchair, hissing, "Wedding? What the hell, Granger?"

"I - I couldn't disagree with her. You saw her. She's just the same, and she's nothing like the same. And on top of it all, now she wants to pull out four of your teeth."

"She what? What have you done?"

Her posture straightened again, defensive. "Nothing, I couldn't do anything. She hardly glanced at me. But did you hear her say my name? She didn't stumble at it, didn't ask where - "

He gripped her by her shoulders. "Granger, stop feeling your way through this. You need to think."

He was right. There were decisions to be made and they were running out of time. If she took too long, took too many visits to learn what she needed to, Malfoy really would lose those teeth and she'd still have no parents. After their meal yesterday, they had talked and talked until they rejected the plan of simply jumping the Wilkins with their wands out, gambling on reversing the spell successfully without their cooperation or support. The original charm was too untried and delicate to bear that kind of risk. What's more, there was evidence that Hermione was not in complete control of the spell - the destination moving from Australia to Canada, and now this conspicuous religious token worn by her previously Christmas-and-Easter-only Anglican mother. And she hadn't even begun to see how the charm had changed her father. They needed time. They needed a better excuse to come back than hacking teeth out of Malfoy's jaw. They needed to go beyond being patients.

Mind racing, wand flicking, she spun to face the wall, initiating what could be salvaged of one of the plans they had considered the night before. When she turned to face Malfoy again, she was holding a large manila envelope. He nodded in agreement as an assistant led him away for x-rays.

By the time the three of them were together again, back in the exam room, Hermione was ready to begin. "If you please, Dr. Gr-Wilkins," she said. "I'm a dental student, back in Britain and I'm in a bit of a bind this summer holiday. You see, my parents live in western Canada, in Saskatchewan, and Draco and I have had to stop here to make some money for the rest of the trip."

"Stuck in Nova Scotia, looking for work? That is unfortunate."

"Yes, but we've no other options. My father is injured and hasn't been able to work for the better part of the year so my parents aren't able to help. But we're left needing to pay for passage west, and once we arrive there will be the added expense of the - the wedding."

"When is that? Your wedding?" the doctor asked, with some force. "Soon, I hope. Long engagements are risky. Oh dear, I've made Draco blush. I apologize, it's none of my business, of course."

"What I mean to ask," Hermione hurried to say, "is whether there's any work for me to do here at your clinic." She waved the envelope. "I have a work permit and letters of reference from professors at my school. I wouldn't expect much for wages, anything really, as long as I'm working."

Dr. Monika pursed her lips. "As it happens we may have an assistant taking an earlier maternity leave than expected. I don't tend to that kind of business myself, though. For that, you'll have to deal with our Dr. Wendell."

Malfoy was free of the dentist chair and in the waiting room when Hermione met Wendell Wilkins for the first time. He seemed himself, friendly and docile under a tuft of frizzy hair. She followed him to the office he shared with Monika, where he looked over her papers.

"Well Miss - Hermee, Hermeye - Hermione, yes. My righteous wife must have prayed you here this morning, that's what she'll tell me, at any rate. You didn't happen to notice how green in the gills our assistant is, did you? She needs to take her leave early - miracle of life, and all that. If you're quite in agreement, Miss Hermione, I'll go give her the good news."

\---------------------------------

"I'm not marrying you, Granger."

"You wish."

"Yes, I wish I wasn't marrying you."

In the front seat of the car, leaving Upper Raleigh, driving back to their motel in the city, she growled at him. "Shut up, Malfoy. I need to think."

"Oi, some kindness here. I just let your mother stick her fingers in my mouth."

She sighed into the steering wheel. "You did. Thank you. I'm sorry. I'm a wreck, I shouldn't be driving."

"Right. Then stop," he said. "The Muggle-wand says there's a public park coming up, to the east. Turn just there and sort yourself out."

She steered the car through an open gate, the trees closer than ever on both sides of the road, their limbs covered more in moss and lichen than in leaves or needles. The road curved and one side of wall of trees fell away completely, their view opening up, at last, over the sea.

The government had groomed a gravel parking lot and built a boardwalk over a long expanse of pale grey sand and sea grass, leading to a beach, wind-lashed and cold even in June. Malfoy kicked a mound of dry seaweed out of his path and sat on the sand, pulling his jacket around him.

"Why can't it be simple?" Hermione said, sitting beside him. "Why couldn't tidying up this memory charm disaster be an afterthought, a footnote on a war story, glossed over, a nothing, an 'of course she did'?"

His voice was flat. "If it was, it wouldn't be true."

"Yes. It'd be a lie, a lie spun by a storyteller that cares little for us." In all the motion and decision of the past few days, Hermione had barely mentioned her theories about the author-mother, but here it was again.

Malfoy lay back in the sand, raised his arm to protect his eyes from the glare of the white sky. "No one's writing a story, Granger. We're not executing a master plan - ours or anyone else's - not right now. We're just living. I have no idea what's coming next and it's for the best. Every time someone's tried to pull off a master plan, it's cost them or someone else everything."

She didn't lay back to look up at the sky, but stayed seated, watching the grey sea, waves cresting and crashing over each other. Wendell and Monika Wilkins - these strange new creatures - were the products of one of her own master plans. "What," she said aloud, "has this cost my parents?"

\---------------------------------

At Wilkins's Family Dentistry, the youngest assistant on staff was leaving early, on an extended maternity leave, heading home to wait for the baby who was making her sick. From the window in their office, Monika Wilkins watched her go, pressing her cross pendant against her lips. Wendell stood in the open doorway behind her. She was getting worse. Still functioning at work, but pushy with the staff and sometimes with the patients, like that poor couple she had needled about their wedding day. The x-ray technician had told him about it and he had followed Monika to the office to try to discuss it with her again - how her new feelings about how people should live, though comforting for her, had to be held at a respectful distance from her expectations for other people. She was always just trying to help, but the technician said the poor boy looked like he was about to faint.

That was the conversation Wendell had intended to have with his wife, but seeing her standing alone, fighting hard not to cry as the assistant left for the last time, he couldn't bring himself to begin.

The fact that they'd managed to be married for over twenty-five years without having any children was unconventional but certainly not unheard of, especially not for a marriage that also served as a professional partnership, as theirs did. Even Monika's grief at the lack of children in their lives was, in many ways, expected of her. What was strangest about their situation were inexplicable signs of motherhood in Monika's body and psyche. She knew she had never been pregnant but the faint, silvery faded stretch marks on her abdomen and breasts were evidence to the contrary. The furrowed brows of every gynecologist at every cervical exam she could remember having were troubling too.

And worst of all was the tremendous, crushing sense of loss Monika could not shake. Instead of growing resilient against it, she was growing more vulnerable. Peri-menopause was setting in. They both knew the signs, and with the end of her fertility, came the beginning of new sorrows.

Wendell didn't know what to make of it. He'd convinced her to see a psychiatrist last year, even taken her on an expensive trip to New York to see a memory regression hypnotist. His private theory was that she'd borne a child as a teenager and given it up, and then blocked out the painful memories of that ordeal. There were no legal records of it and the doctors and therapists had failed to get her to remember. Wendell brought her home from New York unhealed. In the office now, instead of scolding her, he put his arms around her waist and sank his chin into her shoulder, looking out the window with her.

"It's a bit of a new start, isn't it? Turning over the staff?"

She turned to face him, dropped her pendant back into the V of her collar. "Yes. And the Hermione girl seems pleasant enough. Loads of initiative, if not judgment. Not too sure about that fancy boyfriend. There's a lot she can learn from us, I'm sure."


	16. Sixteen

The Muggle-wand said that Nova Scotia had the highest tides in the world. Maybe it was true on some other stretch of coastline, but on the beach outside Upper Raleigh, where Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy had stopped to rest, the tide was flowing slowly, in long, low sheets of cold water. The afternoon ticked away, the water finally surging close enough, loud enough to awaken Malfoy where he lay on the sand. If the tide got much higher, the pair of them would be washed out to sea - or at least made damp. His gums were tender from Monika Wilkins's pointy metal dental probe, and he rubbed his jaw, squinted his eyes open to find Granger sleeping nearby.

Beach sharing isn't bed-sharing. That must have been what she told herself when she sank onto her back beside him to rest. He leaned closer, inspecting her face for signs of tears. It had been a tumultuous day but she hadn't cried, and it made him feel something. Relief, pride?

As a spoiled child, he had not been taught to manage his feelings, and now as an adult, they were still far too mysterious to him. Often not properly under his control, they spilled over his face, exposing and embarrassing him, his father, whomever.

He rolled onto his back, away from Granger. If she woke up and found him looking at her, she might see something unintended in his face. He held the Muggle-wand above himself, selected its camera function, and used it as a mirror, reading his own pale, angular face. There was tension in it, perhaps worry, as he lay beside Granger in the sand.

What was she? How did telling her about the Death Eater dinner party give him the power to take back the act of eating in front of other people - or in front of her, at any rate? Getting better wasn't a simple matter of saying the right words, confessing what hurt and then hopping over it. Something more had happened. Something about her arms and neck - her compassion stooping to meet his grief and sorrowing with him instead of against him. He'd confessed and repented not across a desk in a psychiatrist's office, but in the arms of a former enemy while she murmured all the forgiveness she could against his ear.

They had to move away from the water. He shook Hermione awake without a word, sand clinging to her hair as she sat up, asking about the time. He looked away as she fingered her hair, reading the time for her from the Muggle-wand. If he let himself watch her, what would his face show now? It didn't feel like worry anymore. Now that she was awake and talking to him, he felt something else. It might simply be happy.

She was bossing, planning again. "We can't keep this car," she said. "Now that I've told my parents we're poor students, we need to stop acting like we're living off liquidated Malfoy family gold reserves. No more motels, no more cars. We need to find a place somewhere, small and simple, and within walking distance of the dental clinic. I need you to do that, Malfoy. I'm going to be busy learning how to practice dentistry before tomorrow morning."

He smirked. "You had to tell them you were a proper dental student, couldn't just say you were a humble assistant-in-training."

She groaned. "What have I done?"

He had no idea how to go about finding somewhere to live but assumed that it, like everything out here, would have something to do with the Muggle-wand.

Hermione's first morning of work at the clinic was not disastrous. The Wilkins eased her in slowly, giving her jobs identical to ones she had learned to do for them in their clinic when she was a young girl. "Aren't you lovely, Hermione," beamed Wendell when he saw how she'd laid out his instruments. "How in the world did you know to set it up backwards for this old left-hander?"

Malfoy returned to the clinic during the noon-hour, tired and hot from walking all over Upper Raleigh looking for signs of vacancies. "There's nothing available," he said. "Well, there's one loft to let but it's over a horse barn, so if you don't mind the smell getting into everything…"

"We'll have to start looking in the next closest town. Maybe if I get a bicycle -"

"No, that won't do," Monika said, carrying a coffee pot into clinic's breakroom. "The shoulders on the sides of our roads are too narrow. You'll be run over. Let me make some inquiries."

"Oh, would you?"

"Certainly, but it isn't going to be easy," she said. "Looking for two small apartments for two single people at once."

From across the room, Wendell saw Hermione blush crimson. "But they aren't single, darling," he rushed to say. "They're merely detoured on their way to their wedding in Saskatchewan, all but married, aren't you? Surely there's no need - "

"Leave it, leave it. It's none of my business, I'm sure," Monika was saying as she retreated. "Sleep where you like."

Wendell stood up to follow, apologizing. "I'll speak with her. She hasn't mentioned it to you but we've a vacant apartment in our out-building. It's a bit musty but there's no livestock in it." He laughed at himself. "It'd be a slick transaction if you'd made it legal already. I reckon she'd have you move right in as honest man and wife. Under the circumstances, however - not under her roof. But let me see if I can get through to her."

Hermione's head collapsed on the table as he left. "So horrible. My parents think I'm shagging Draco Malfoy out of wedlock."

He smirked and patted her hard on the back. "There are more horrible things they could think you were doing."

She sat up, swatting at his hand. "Are there? Look at how my mother is with me. Dad is nice but she's openly disgusted."

He was laughing at her. "So why did you tell her we were a couple then?"

"I didn't expect her to be like this. I had no idea she was so prissy and churchy now. She never was before. How could I have known?"

"Hey," he said. "What did she think of Weasley?"

"She was fine with him, but she left before we ever - "

"Say no more, Granger."

A week passed, more commuting from the city to Upper Raleigh, more cold distant Monika speaking tersely polite orders to Hermione over the dental chair. "Suction. Thank you. Rinse. Thank you."

In the motel, after another quiet,frosty day in the clinic, Hermione fell on her bed, covered her head with a pillow.

Malfoy tossed another pillow at her, flinching as it hit her on the butt. "Come on, Granger. You must be winning her over by now. Maternal instinct and all that."

She threw her own pillow at his head. "No. She's getting farther from me every day. Dad is doing a good job glossing it over and being sweet so she's all the more chilly to make sure I don't misunderstand. It's not normal. Somewhere inside her, she knows she's my mother, and she's punishing me for going home with you every day against her wishes."

Malfoy hummed and sat on her bed next to her. "I could stop being a problem. We're not actually poor, Granger. I can always go back to the UK and leave you to it."

"No." She said it quickly, like a reflex, sitting up and clamping a hand over his arm. "Don't leave me alone with them."

He fought to keep his face neutral. This was what he wanted her to say when he offered to disappear. His face was breaking into feeling, and he forced himself to cough, easing his arm out of her grip. "Maybe we should ask Wendell how it's going - how he's getting on convincing Monika to let us move into their flat."

Hermione rolled her eyes. "That's typical of Dad - unreasonably optimistic. No, having them be the ones to take us in would be too good to be true. Living right alongside them - there's no better way to prepare them to lift the memory charm. Maybe they wouldn't even need it removed, they'd just remember me on their own if I went back to being part of their household. Can you imagine Malfoy?"

He stood up, took a step away, and sat down again, across for her, on his own bed. He pressed both his palms to the back of his neck. "About that, Hermione…"

She blinked. "Hermione?"

"Yeah." He waited, bouncing slightly on the edge of the bed, as if gathering momentum. "So, it seems that if it was just made it legal according to Muggle law, that'd be good enough for the Wilkins. It wouldn't have to be a real, proper wizards's arrangement."

She narrowed her eyes. "Wizards's arrangement? What are you saying, Malfoy?"

"Draco," he said. "If it's going to be like this, you should probably start addressing me more warmly."

She scoffed. "Fine, Draco," she said, not at all warmly. "Now tell me what you're on about."

He let out a noisy breath. "The Muggle laws don't mean much to me. And so, what I'm saying is, it wouldn't really be like we were actually married if we went and, as Wendell says, made it legal. Muggle-legal, at any rate. We'll annul it before we go back to the real wizarding world, back home. It'll be like it never happened. No one will even have to know. Only, it will have got you what we came for."

She scooted across her bed, the rest of the pillows tumbling onto the floor. "By the stars, Malfoy. You would do that? You would sign a Muggle marriage certificate with me, so I could live with my parents again? Malfoy, that's - "

He was stammering over her gratitude, cutting it short. "Well, it's not like you've never done anything for me. There was that thing - with my eating - you helped me. I'm getting better and I'm in your debt for that one. Think of a fake Muggle marriage to get your parents back as a discharge of that debt. It's an arrangement, but it's not a real marriage. It affects nothing in the real world."

Malfoy had expected her to fly off in a frenzy of activity, looking up requirements and addresses of offices where they could get it done. But instead she sat still, on her knees in the centre of her bed. "It does change one thing. No matter how little you care about it, no matter who else we keep it from, this will matter an awful lot to someone, and I have to tell him about it."

"Look, Granger," he said. "It's just an idea. We can work something else out. You don't have to."

"Yes, I do. If I want my mother to stop pushing me away, yes I do. But I have to do it decently." She was reaching for her bag. "One more thing today, Malfoy. Can you take a walk? You shouldn't be here when I contact Ron."

\----------------------

George shoved him awake. "Ronaaaaaald. Ron, shut off the noise."

He sat up fast, pressing the top of the tent with his head, fumbling in his sleeping bag for the Communication Compact. How long had it been buzzing before George noticed? The sun was up but it was still early, a chilly winter morning in Australia at fifteen degrees Celsius.

Finally, here was Hermione signalling him through the Compact. He held it in his hand, its vibrations moving through his palm.

Ron and George had been in Australia for over a week, arriving through a five-step portkey transport: London to Amsterdam to Istanbul to Johannesburg to Brisbane - or nearly Brisbane. The Australian portkey was tucked into the scales of a giant pineapple statue at an old plantation. For the Weasleys, there was no need for Muggle airplanes, no interrogation rooms, just a dizzy materialization at the pineapple, and the purchase of a pair of secondhand surfboards the local wizarding community used the same way British wizards used brooms.

No one they talked to remembered seeing anyone who looked like Malfoy in the area, but Ron watched for him all the same. At least, that's what he thought he was doing. In fact, he was mostly leaning against his surfboard, sitting in the sand on the beach, a spectator in George's long overdue holiday. Both of them had burned their skin pink but it had healed to a tan, new freckles blooming on their shoulders. Their ginger hair was lightening into something more golden than orange. George was amassing friends and admirers at every beach they camped at. There were always loads of people around to question about whether they'd seen anyone like Hermione. But something in Ron held him back, kept him staring on the beach, not asking anything of anyone at all. He was a cooling volcano, molten heartbreak crusting over into rock in the south Pacific sea.

And now the Communication Compact was buzzing like a wasp in the tent. George sat up, sighing as the noise continued. He unzipped the tent and stepped out onto the beach, tugging off his shirt, scratching his flanks, leaving Ron to face her image in the glass alone. Ron's volcano heart was pounding, but he didn't bother to smooth his hair before opening the Compact.

"Where are you?" she asked. "Why is the sun still up at night?"

"I'm not in England. I'm - I'm on holiday with George."

"Oh. Having a good time?"

He rubbed his eyes. "I was. How is it with your parents?"

She told him everything - that she was in Canada, how her mother had changed, and what she believed she had to do next.

Ron blew out a long breath. "Madam Malfoy."

She closed her eyes, smarting at his pain. "Not for real."

He flicked his overgrown rose gold fringe out of his face. "Oh no, it'll be real. I think my mum has this trashy novel at home. The Daily Prophet is writing their own version: The Gralfoy Affair."

"Ronald, please..."

But there was nothing left to argue about.

"I'm going," he said. "Wouldn't want to ruin anyone else's engagement."

He clicked the Compact closed, threw it at the wall of the tent where it whistled weakly against the nylon wall, sliding to the floor.

Stepping out of the tent, Ron spotted George, floating in the morning tide on his surfboard, shouting and beckoning him out. It was the same every morning, Ron waving him off and settling into his day of staring from the sand. But today, his feet moved, breaking into a run across the sand, board under his arm, cold sea at his toes. George cheered, punching at the air, wheeling 'round to lead him out, paddling into the surf.

\----------------------------------

The Wilkins stepped out of their large silver vehicle and into the parking lot of a Halifax registry office. Instead of dental scrubs, Monika was dressed in a pink suit and high heels, a white rose pinned to her lapel.

"Still seems like a bit of a shame, depriving the girl's own mother of the chance to see her married," Wendell said as she fussed with the tiny wilting rose pinned to his jacket.

Monika sniffed. "There's still the ceremony and the dress and whatever else they think is important. Her mother will have all of that. This afternoon is all about the legal part. The boring part."

"The real part."

"Pish-tosh, Wendell."

"It's real enough for you to insist on it before letting them share our roof."

"Well, something had to be done," Monika argued, picking lint from his shoulders. "You've seen the way he leers at her in view of everyone. Imagine what he's like in private. It's indecent that they won't live separately when they're not yet married."

Wendell took her hands in his. "Monika, darling, we were the same at their age."

She withdrew her hands. "That's not how I remember it."

"Even so, we simply can't expect - "

"Hush, Wendell, here they are."

Hermione and Malfoy had just rounded a corner and stepped into view. She seemed to jump at the sight of the Wilkins already waiting for them and scrambled to take Malfoy by the hand, their fingers jamming as they tried to intertwine them.

Hermione looked exactly as Monika expected her to, wearing a cheap white sundress purchased that morning from a chain store, the flouncy, shoulderless uniform of the impromptu summer bride. Malfoy's looks surprised her, dressed more like a count than a bridegroom, his jacket too long and flowing, his tie too lustrous white and held in place with a pin. Fancy boyfriend indeed.

Monika pinned a rose to each of them, threaded her arm through Wendell's, and motioned them ahead of her, into the office.

Just outside the glass doors, Hermione stopped short, catching her reflection in the silver-painted window panes. It was nothing - a fake marriage, a Muggle-only marriage, a ruse to get close enough to her parents to bring them back. Her face in the glass was terrified anyway. Malfoy was watching her, watching herself. It was time for him to return the favour she had done him in Gatwick Airport, when she had kissed his cheek and given him the jolt to move forward. She saw him bending toward her, clenched her eyes closed.

And then, on the cheek opposite him, she felt someone else kiss her first. It was Monika Wilkins, smiling at Hermione when she opened her eyes, already wiping her mauve lipstick off Hermione's cheek. "Come on, love," she said, pushing open the door before them. "Time for what's next."


	17. Seventeen

Draco Malfoy stood back and let Hermione's mother kiss her on the threshold of the registry office where he was about to get married under Muggle law. Wendell Wilkins watched him over the tops of the women's heads, saw the flush in his complexion from his cheekbones to his throat resolve back to its usual pale whiteness. It was an odd reaction in a man about to peck his fiancee on the cheek - far too nervous, too momentous.

Though he had taken to championing Hermione's right to make her own decisions about this relationship, Wendell did not have complete confidence in those decisions, particularly, in her choice of Draco himself. Something between Hermione and Draco seemed - off. In her righteous panic over the chastity of her incoming tenants, Monika didn't seem to notice, and she was smiling pleasantly, warmly at Hermione now, as she had never done before, as they stepped through the doors.

The office of the justice of the peace was clean, sparsely decorated in blue and grey, and filled by a small woman at a large desk. She checked everyone's identification, collected signatures and money, and beamed at the four of them as she rose to her feet.

"There," she chirped. "Are we ready? Can we start?"

Hermione and her parents stood up from their chairs, but Malfoy didn't move. Instead, he coughed into his elbow, once and then again in a long, hacking fit.

Hermione knelt beside him. "Malf - Draco, what is it? Are you choking?"

His reply was almost impossible to understand through his coughing. But it sounded something like, "Smell."

Hermione sniffed the air. It smelled like paper and window cleaner.

"Is he allergic to anything?" Monika was asking.

"I don't - " The smell reached Hermione's senses before she could finish. The air in the office was thick with the heavy floral scent of narcissus. "Yes, yes he is," she rushed to say. "Certain flowers."

Malfoy was clawing at the lush white tie twisted and knotted around his neck and pinned to the front of his shirt. Hermione reached for the white rose Monika had pinned to his lapel but he grabbed at the white diamond pin in his tie, tearing at it. Hermione had never seen it before. It looked antique, old, like an heirloom brought with him from Malfoy Manor, where he cautioned her anything could be cursed. She waved Malfoy's flailing hands aside and wrench the pin out of its clasp, letting it drop to the floor and covering it with her foot before removing the rose.

"It wouldn't be the roses themselves," she said, as his coughing subsided. "But they must have been contaminated by one of his trigger flowers while they were still in the shop, or something like that."

Wendell was pounding Malfoy on the back. The justice of the peace had left to get him a cup of water. Monika was collecting the rest of the roses and looking for a bin. "Come along, Niki," Wendell was saying, taking Monika by the arm. "I think these two might need to talk."

"What an odd and delicate boy," Monika remarked in the corridor outside.

"It's not right," Wendell said. "He's so nervous at his own wedding he can't even breathe. It's not right."

Inside the office, Hermione was pushing the Malfoy family diamond heirloom stick pin into an envelope with the end of a pen.

"I'm sorry," Malfoy was saying. "I never should have brought something from the house. It let my mother in here with us."

Hermione sat down in the chair beside him. "I still don't see why that's a crisis. What kind of mother would sit by doing nothing on the day her child risked ruining themselves with a sham marriage - that is, besides my mother."

He was exhausted, leaning into his lap, head in his hands. "It's not the same."

"Well, we know your mother is aware of where you are and what you're doing. What we don't know is what she's trying to do about it beyond getting your attention. What does she want, Malfoy?"

He rolled his head between his hands. "Besides wanting me throttled half to death? I think it's pretty clear what she thinks of all this."

"Don't be so dramatic." She patted him hard on the back and he coughed one more time. "Honestly, is there nothing you can do to find out what it all means? Don't forget, there is one more thing we know about her connection to all this. Whatever she's doing, it's got to be out of crazy love for you."

He sat up quickly. "It doesn't matter what she thinks, or what she wants. If she thinks this is a big deal, she's mistaken. Just bring the Wilkins back in. Let's finish this."

She sat back. "It doesn't have to be today."

He looked into her face for the first time since they'd arrived at the office. "Well, why not?"

She looked away, stammering. "Because you're unwell and there's still - the other thing to come. I don't know if you're up for it. And I can tell Dad is starting to wonder about us. It has to look real."

The other thing to come - they had already discussed it. Hermione had warned him that Muggle weddings were not much different from wizard weddings, and at the end of the official transaction, even with just two witnesses for guests, he would be expected to kiss her. The man who had just re-learned how to put food in his mouth in front of other people would have to kiss her in a small room full of people.

His face flushed again, blood tingling into his cheeks so forcefully it almost hurt. "We've gone this far today," he said, "there's no point going home just to start all over again. Bring everyone back in. It's fine."

Her face was flushed now too. "You can do it? All of it? Even..."

"Yes, Granger," he burst. "I can fake kiss you."

She stamped her foot. "You can't fake it. There's no room to hide anything in here. They'll be able to tell if it's just positioning."

"I never said I'd just pretend to kiss you. I'll do it. I'll put my mouth on you while they watch. But that doesn't mean it will be anything but," he swallowed, "fake."

She nodded. "Fake."

"Yes, it's all fake."

"Right," she said. "I'll get the others."

She opened the door and after a flurry of reassurances, forced, embarrassed laughter, and the drinking of the cup of water the justice of the peace had brought, they were standing up, hands joined, agreeing to lifelong promises they had no intention of honoring. It had seemed so easy, so glib when Malfoy first suggested this as a way to win the Wilkins over. But the Muggle official's wedding script read too much like a magic spell - too familiar, too real.

By the time she reached the end, after each of them had spoken the word "yes" out loud, face to face, Malfoy's grip on Hermione's hand was tight and cold with sweat. The justice of the peace told them they could now kiss. His eyes clenched shut as his head darted forward, his mouth sealed closed, bumping against just the corner of hers.

The Wilkins were clapping dutifully, and the justice was laughing sweetly at the most bashful bridegroom she had ever seen.

Hermione felt sick. He had faked nothing. He had hardly kissed her because this was all real and he couldn't ignore it. He had just married someone he was not in love with, and it was wrong. He knew it.

What were her parents thinking of this mess? She rose up, fighting to salvage something that her father might remember as sweet and credible from this ridiculous debacle. Wrenching her hand from Malfoy's slick grip, she threw her arms around his shoulders, pressing her face against his neck, nuzzling into him and hopping off the ground, both her legs bent at the knees, forcing him to hold her close to keep both of them from falling down. She held her feet in the air long enough to hear her mother say, "Here, here, congratulations."

\------------------------------

"I told you we should have waited for another day," Hermione said, swiping the keycard in the motel door. The Wilkins had treated them to a very awkward dinner, dropped them off, and the newest Madam Malfoy was alone with her husband for the first time. "Honestly, Malfoy, what a disaster."

He groaned as he fell onto his bed. "At least it's over. We never have to do that again."

"Too right. And now that we can't go back, your job going forward is to try to act like this isn't the end of the world - like it doesn't make you sick. Can you do that?" She threw her handbag and their manila envelope full of documents onto the table.

"It does not make me sick," he protested.

She wrenched her dressy wedding sandals off her feet. "Oh, really?"

"Yes. I told you, the coughing was my mother's magic."

"Fine but what about that - that whatever you were doing to my mouth at the end of it - what was that?" She was standing between their beds, her shoes in her hands, her shoulders heaving with her breath.

He looked up at her from where he lay on his bed. "Look, I'm sorry if that was disappointing -- "

She interrupted him by tossing a sandal far too hard into the closet. "Disappointing? Don't flatter yourself, Malfoy."

"What I mean," he rushed to say, "is that this is harder than I thought it would be -- everything about it, not just today. This isn't my country, these Muggles aren't my people. It's confusing. And when your mother isn't mad at me, your dad is. It's relentlessly terrifying. And then my mother went and stepped in. It was all supposed to be fake. It was supposed to be nothing. But…"

He'd gone and said it out loud. He hadn't meant to but there it was. He had admitted to her that, now that it was here, this marriage was not nothing.

She sat down, not on her bed, on his. "I know," she said. "There's something to it. We said those words in that office and brought something to life, as if we cast a spell. It's more than a certificate and that's not what I expected. I'm sorry."

He rolled away from her, his face in his pillow.

She continued. "We won't let this marriage last long. But while it's here, we'd better respect it. We'd better treat each other well - with kindness and civility, warmth even. I'll call you Draco. Maybe I'll get a ring to wear. I'll remember to take your hand when we go out. I'll -"

As she'd spoken, he'd rolled onto his side, swept his arm toward her and pulled her down to rest her head on the pillow beside him. Her eyes were wide, watching him as he swallowed a lump in his throat and said, "Don't worry about any of that tonight. The only plan we need is the one you already assigned me: to act normal, to figure out how to live like this for as long as we have to."

They looked at each other across his pillow. What he'd said sounded almost like a promise to her, the first sincere one he'd made that day. It was heavy, making her heart thump. She reached for something light.

"Draco," she said, as if swishing the word around her mouth. "Dray-koh."

He smiled, just inches from her face. "Easy, yeah?"

She trilled the r. "Drrrraco."

"Still easier than Hermetically - Hermopheles - Harm-my-own-knee - Hum-by-those-bees."

"Stop - stop it - say it properly."

She was shoving him, laughing. He was grabbing at her hands, holding them still as she struggled next to him in his bed. And the weight of their marriage fell down on them again, suddenly, sparking to life between their hands as they grappled and laughed together. It silenced them, left them holding one another's hands, face to face on his pillow.

Gazing into each other's eyes was out of the question. Hermione knew it and wound up looking at his mouth instead. At that moment, his lips looked fuller, pinker than she remembered, and soft, as if he used a balm on them, though she'd never seen him do it. Maybe he'd just done it today, in preparation for that pathetic wedding peck. Had his lips been so smooth and soft when they touched hers? Frankly, it all happened so quickly and curtly that she hadn't been able to tell. But now her fingers were itching in his grip, wanting to touch his mouth, only the third that had ever touched hers. She was curious about it, drawn back to it by unanswered questions.

She went so far as to tug against his hold on her right hand. He let her go without any resistance, her fingers now free to touch him. And she knew then that her fingers wouldn't tell her everything she wanted to know. In the registry office, they hadn't stayed in contact long enough for her to taste him, to learn the feel of his lips on hers, to close her eyes and...

All at once she remembered herself. This was a real marriage but being in love was just a pretense. And people who are not in love do not lie in bed feeling each other's lips. She startled, jerking her head back and looking up to his eyes. They were not looking into hers, but focused on her mouth.

He couldn't be...

Her pulse surged as she sat up, talking fast. "Well, I'm exhausted. We're moving tomorrow. Better get to sleep."

She heard him grunt in what must have been assent as he flipped over, away from her as she turned down the covers of her own bed.

\---------------------------------------

He wasn't sleeping. It was late, maybe late enough to be early. They were due at the Wilkins in the morning, learning to clean and paint the old apartment without wands or magic. He'd be stumbling around dead tired as if they'd been up all night, together. He hated it. Hermione had been sleeping quietly in her bed for hours, her face to the curtained windows, her back to him. The loneliest times of day were the hours when she slept, and he didn't.

He had turned in his own bed, going over every stupid thing he'd done that day: bringing something of his parents' to the registry office, making the wedding kiss so painful for everyone, and then indulging himself in holding onto Hermione's hands for too long, making her feel like she had to escape to her own space while he was still wanting her company. Though that was for the best. He shouldn't want her for anything. It wouldn't be good for either of them.

Somehow, understanding this didn't make it any easier for him to fall asleep.

Getting out of bed, he walked to the table where she'd dropped their things when they got back from their wedding. There was her bag, his crumpled tie, a large envelope with their certificate of marriage from the government of Nova Scotia, and a smaller, heavier envelope - the one folded around the stick pin. He slipped on his shoes and carried the envelope outside. A wooden picnic table stood at one end of the motel parking lot where people sometimes went to smoke. He sat down at it, dressed in sweatpants and a stretched-out T-shirt that gaped open at the neck, revealing the edge of the scar on his chest.

Safely away from Hermione, he poured the pin out of the envelope, into the palm of his hand. It was a beautiful diamond, faintly blue and impossibly clear. He raised it to his nose but all he smelled was the diesel burning from the trucks on the highway, and the tobacco crushed into the ashtray.

"Show yourself, mother."

Nothing appeared in the facets of the diamond. No flash of white hair, no blue eyes so icy they looked grey, no narcissus petals. For the first time since the trials, he was ready to see her, ready to listen for her voice, but nothing would come, not even her scent. Everyone he loved was everyone he longed for.

He looked up at the dark window of their motel room.

The Muggle-wand buzzed in his pocket, startling him. There was no way his mother could be reaching him that way, but he grabbed at the phone anyway. It was a message from Wendell Wilkins who, apparently, was not sleeping either. There were no words, just a photograph taken by a honeysuckle bush at the edge of the registry office parking lot. It was a picture of Malfoy and Hermione - possibly the only one in existence. They were in their wedding clothes, arm in arm, smiling at her parents behind the camera.

What the Daily Prophet wouldn't pay for this.


	18. Eighteen

The Wilkins's flat was in the attic of an old, empty garage at the back of their country property, detached but in view of the main house. The distance between the buildings was an overgrown meadow of wildflowers and woody, thorny raspberry brambles full of bees, bisected by a path worn into long green grass. When they bought the property, along the main road through Upper Raleigh, the Wilkins had talked about pruning and grooming it into a bed and breakfast, but the dental practice took all their time and it was left undone. Wendell wondered - only briefly - about striking a deal with the young Malfoy couple to work away at the renovation project themselves for a reduced rent. That was before he saw Draco holding a paintbrush pinched between two fingers, scowling at it like it was a dead rat he was being forced to hold by the tail.

"What does your Draco - do?" he asked Hermione as she stood on the stairs above him, sweeping dust and cobwebs away.

Her answer was ready. "He's a student, like me. Only he studies literature. You know - old-fashioned English poetry and theatre. He loves Hamlet."

Wendell hummed. "How daring. And his family?"

"Old money. Awful aristocrats. He's an only child but he's fallen out with his parents recently and is still trying to sort himself out."

Wendell chuckled. "That explains a lot."

He reported his findings to Monika as they were carrying bags of rubbish up to the road. "So it's no wonder he's so effete and awkward. Can't say I understand Hermione's attraction to these pallid boys, the red-head was bulkier but just as wan looking about the face, really."

Monika frowned. "Red-head?"

"Yes, Hermione's last romance, the red…" Wendell's voice trailed into silence.

"Whatever do you mean? We've only just met the girl. How could we know anything about her dating history?"

Wendell was as surprised at himself as she was. "We couldn't. I must be thinking of someone else. Or maybe there were pictures I saw somewhere, like on a social media something or other."

Monika shrugged. "I suppose so. Whatever you do, Wendell, let it go. You're obsessing like an overprotective father and I'm sure she's got her own father doing a fine job of that out in Saskatchewan. At any rate, she's nicely married now and they'll make the best of it, I'm sure."

Malfoy waited until the Wilkins were hauling the rubbish away before setting down his paintbrush and getting his wand.

"What are you up to, Draco? Malfoy, no. They told us to paint it."

"They never specified how."

"Well, of course they didn't intend for us to paint it magically."

"That's just because they don't realize it's an option." And without negotiating any further, he flicked his wand and the wall he'd been dabbing at with his brush all morning while Wendell cringed was flawlessly covered in the pale yellow colour he was growing to hate the longer he had to work with it.

She rushed toward him. "Alright, that's enough. And look, now you've got yellow paint on your hawthorn."

They were standing in the middle of the room with their heads bent over Malfoy's wand, scraping paint off its handle, when they heard the Wilkins on the stairs. As Malfoy hurried to tuck it out of sight, he flicked one more wall yellow.

The Wilkins had come back from the house with sandwiches for lunch. Malfoy was quiet, as he was every time the four of them ate together, concentrating on eating normally.

"Well, I must say I'm pleased with your progress," Wendell said. "The place is coming together faster than I feared it would. Well done, Malfoy family. You're on track to sleep here tonight. We only need to bring in the mattress." He stood up, eyed Malfoy, who was still engrossed with trying not to choke on his lunch, and decided to ask Hermione to help him carry the bed inside.

She had already noticed the old double bedstead nailed to the floor at one end of the attic, but other than that, two wooden chairs, and an old stove and refrigerator, there was no more furniture.

"We'll scrounge a little more together," Wendell said when she remarked on it. "A table for certain, a sofa in due time. But this should do for the first night, eh? Just the necessaries."

Malfoy took her end of the mattress from her as she brought it through the door and helped Wendell set it in the bedstead. He glanced at Hermione, who was measuring it with her eyes, a little miserably, but making no complaints to her parents.

It was her parents, after all, not her sleeping arrangements which were her chief concern now that she'd moved to Upper Raleigh. She stuck close to Monika all day, hoping to find an obvious chink in the memory charm, a place to begin to examine it with a mind to take it apart. She watched Monika's hands as she scrubbed and cleaned, their flesh hidden from sight by a pair of pink rubber gloves. The connection between Monika and her forgotten daughter might be best preserved through their bodies. Long ago, before Hermione was born, she and her mother had been one creature. How could Monika's body have forgotten just because this legacy had been hidden from her cognition. Something remained. Hermione had felt it when Monika kissed her cheek at the wedding.

It meant she put herself in Monika's way for the rest of the day, bumping against her, letting dust and lint cling to her skin and hair so Monika would reach out to brush it away.

It would have worked better if it hadn't also worked so well on Malfoy. In the hottest part of the afternoon, Hermione was bent over the oven door, her hair loose and dirty, clinging to her face, when he crouched next to her, sliding both of his hands under the mass of her hair, up her neck, gathering the bushy mess into a single swath which he twisted into an elastic. She froze, breathless as he handled her, his cooler hands on her warm skin.

Every now and then, he did this - went from being halting and disconnected from her to executing these fluid, flawless but complicated series of motions, manipulating her physically, through space with a smooth perfection - as if she was a snitch he'd reached out and caught. It always left her momentarily overwhelmed. It happened when he grabbed her and apparated away from St. Mungo's, when he slid her panicking out from under the chandelier in the Malfoy Manor drawing room, when he pulled her onto his pillow the night before, and now.

"Malfoy, you scared me," is what she said, one hand over her throat, as if to hide her pulse.

"Look at the state of you," he said. "Filthy -- new wife. You have to take care of yourself now, or it reflects badly on me." He was still arranging her hair, pushing stray locks of it behind her ears.

"Don't fuss over me," she said. "I'm letting my hair get messy on purpose. I'm trying to bait my mother into touching me. I think physical contact will prepare her to remember."

"Oh. Right. You want me to let your hair back down?" He was reaching toward her neck again.

She threw herself away from him, off of her knees, sitting down hard, both hands covering her throat now. "No, no, just leave it." She was still overreacting, ridiculous. She saw it, took a deep breath, deflected, saying, "You look tired."

"I am. I was up last night, trying to contact my mother through the diamond pin. It was useless though. Not a whiff of her."

She offered at sad smile. "I'm glad you tried, though."

He hummed. "I've been thinking about it all day. She's never manifested herself without three things being present: me, something from the house, and you. When I tried to reach her with just two of those things, she wasn't there."

Hermione didn't know what to make of it.

"I don't know either," he said. "But it's about you, somehow. If I could trust her not to hurt you, I'd take that pin and find out as soon as your parents clear out for the day. But I still don't know. And it wouldn't be alright with me, you getting hurt."

"That's a new development," she said, joking but darkly.

He picked at a stain on the floor with his thumbnail. "Is it?"

It was dark outside when the Wilkins left for the day, darker than it had ever got in the city. Upper Raleigh had few streetlights, all of them set out on the road, their light blocked by the Wilkins's larger house. Malfoy stood up from where they'd been eating pizza on the kitchen floor by a small electric lamp. He washed his hands and rummaged through his bag until he found a heavy wool coat.

"Are you cold?" she asked him as she watched him slide his arms into the satin-lined sleeves of the coat. "I don't think the furnace is working yet, but we've got our wands."

"No, I'm not cold now, but I reckon I will be." He hoisted his bag over his shoulder. "Right. Are you still carrying around that tent?"

She blinked. "Yes, but - "

He held on his hand. "Let's have it. I'll take it and go sleep on the beach. I know where it is so I can apparate there and back before mummy and daddy even know I've gone."

She was frowning. "What are you on about? Of course you'd do better to just sleep here."

He scoffed. "On what? On the floor? No bed-sharing - all this time that's been the only rule, really."

Her colour was rising slightly. "Draco - that was before."

He held up both his hands, shaking his head in a sarcastic protest. "No, no, legal or not, no sharing. You still got up and went to your own bed last night at the motel."

"We had two beds there, why would I - "

"Just give me the tent, Granger," he said, extending his hand a second time. "I'll see you in the morning, early. I'm exhausted. Let me go."

She looked down the length of the attic, toward the bed piled high with cushions Monika had sent from the main house. "Look, I'm not sleepy yet," Hermione said. "And you are obviously knackered. So stop sulking and go lie down properly in the only bed we have and I'll - I'll sort myself out when I turn in. This is that new normal you were talking about yesterday. It can't be helped. We'll both sleep in the bed until Dad finds us a sofa."

He let his bag thud to the floor. "You're sure?"

She shifted nervously on her feet. "There're no other options."

He huffed. "Well, do you want me to sleep fully dressed in my street clothes, shoes on and everything? It would definitely keep me from getting too comfortable."

She sighed, rolling her shoulders. "No, of course not, Draco. Don't be annoyed. Be comfortable. Be normal. It's nothing -- "

He interrupted with a laugh more like a shout. "Nothing? That's what it never is."

"Draco, all I'm saying is, the weirder we make this the worse it gets."

That was how, on the second night of his marriage, and against the most basic bit of marriage advice anyone has ever heard, Draco Malfoy went to bed mad. 

"Weird - worse." She was leaving him feeling like a filthy dog she had no choice but to let clamber onto her bed. Would she even come to bed at all, or would it be too repulsive? Maybe she'd remember what an accomplished witch she was supposed to be and transform the empty pizza box into a bed for herself. She would wake up reeking of pepperoni but heaven knows it would be better than sleeping with her husband.

Angry as anything, he fell asleep.

Hermione stayed up late, pacing the floor, mourning the end of a successful run of traveling with male companions and never sharing a bed. Of course she'd slept in the same bed as Ron countless times. It was a sweet memory, cozy and warm, and she'd developed a habit of snuggling into his back, face between his shoulder blades as she was waking up. What would her sleeping body do if it was left unsupervised with Malfoy's?

And more than that, spending the night with him, even this way, took her another step farther from the life she once thought she'd have, the one she'd wanted from the time she was a teenager. Here was the delayed grief of letting more of that life go. The wedding had been too frantic and bizarre a time to sense it properly, but she was feeling it now.

She walked to the window and looked out toward her parents' house. They must have gone to bed already. Did they ever think of her, speak of her when she wasn't standing in their sight?

The loneliness, the loss of family crashed harder, and she left the window. Turning out the light, she crossed the floor, and lifted the cover on the bed in the dark. If she couldn't see him, she could imagine she was going to bed alone again, as she always did. But the smell of him drifted over her on the warm air beneath the blanket. Ron had a sweet smell that filled her head. Malfoy's was different, rich and settling low in her belly. Her feelings reacted to the smell of him in her bed before her mind did - feelings of comfort, and something stranger.

She planted two cushions firmly between herself and Draco Malfoy, and went to sleep.


	19. Nineteen

The attic flat was ablaze with sunlight in the morning, magnified by the fresh pale yellow paint on all four walls. Hermione woke first, blinking, slightly sore after a day of hard physical work, but untouched on her side of the dam of cushions down the centre of the bed. Despite the bright light, Malfoy slept on. Maybe he was sick. She sat up to check on him over the cushions. Sunlight suffused through his skin and hair, giving him a positively, deceptively angelic look as he slept against the white pillow cases.

She laughed quietly, through just her nose. He was not a monster, no longer the exploited child puppet of a monster. He was a decent traveling companion, a terrible faker, possibly a decent excuse for a husband, but he was no angel. Was he still angry, like he had been last night? His fingers lay curved and relaxed on the pillow beside his face. Was it just more deceptive innocence? She rubbed her neck. It didn't seem possible that he had touched her like that, yesterday while she scrubbed the oven - so attentive, even affectionate. This was the boy who had once wished to send flowers to the person who'd given her a black eye.

Yes, but he did notice the black eye.

She fell back against her pillow. Now that bully was the man who had told her it was not alright with him if she got hurt. Any marriage is serious, transformative, but hers was also confusing and possibly dangerous. The safest thing she could do at that moment would be to get up, tidy her side of the bed, and busy herself with the day. But then he might not know she had eventually come to bed and stayed there all night, warmed by his heat, safe, and she wanted him to know. She lifted her hair to see if any of his smell had transferred to her. It hadn't.

But her quick backward fall had disturbed him, and Malfoy was grumbling and squinting awake in the sunlight.

"Good morning," she sang from her side of the bed. "Seems we'll need to hang some curtains right away. It's rather bright up here."

He rubbed his eyes, peering at her over the cushions. "You look rested. So why do I still feel so bad? Did you stupefy me in my sleep, just to be safe?"

She swatted him across the cushion dam.

It was early on a Sunday morning but there was already a note tacked to the outside of their door. The Wilkins had gone to church but they'd left fresh scones and homemade raspberry jam for their breakfast in the kitchen of the main house. It was a gift celebrating the first lazy day of what was, after all, their honeymoon.

Glad for the invitation and the chance it would give her to explore the main house, Hermione dragged Malfoy through the yard before his hair had dried from his shower. She wasn't interested in food but in touring the living areas on the main floor. The walls were decorated with nothing but chain store art - photographs and paintings of landscapes and still-lifes. There were no images of human beings in any of their pictures frames, not even a portrait of the Wilkins themselves.

The bookshelves were stranger. One entire wall of the lounge was lined with shelves, but they housed nothing but volumes of scientific dental journals, as if the decades the Wilkins could have spent amassing a personal collection of books had been taken from them. The only true books Hermione found were a copy of a proper English King James Bible and a hard bound, illustrated version of William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. She pulled it from the bookcase and forced it into Malfoy's hands.

"This - why is there only this one? What does it mean?"

He laughed. "Yes, it has to be this one, doesn't it."

"Why? Tell me." He was too slow and she was taking the book back, ready to read it for herself that instant.

"Where does your name come from, Hermione?"

"It's Greek, of course. The female form of the god Hermes, and the name of the daughter of Helen of Troy."

"Where else does it come from?"

She was not playing literary games with him but clawing at the book for herself, open now to the cast of characters where she read her own name: Queen Hermione.

He reached over her shoulder to flip the pages. "See, the play revolves around a missing person named Hermione. The plot is actually about false accusations of adultery but the point for Monika has got to be something more along the lines of grieving a lost family member for years just to have them miraculously return, like a statue coming back to life. Here, turn to the back."

He scanned through the scenes. "Here they are, a daughter and a very bad but repentant father are admiring a statue of the missing Hermione who they assume is dead. Look at the picture. The statue is so life-like everyone's astonished when they see it unveiled. And then 'Music, awake her; strike,'" he read aloud. "And the statue is warm and alive and stepping down from her plinth, and her husband's shouting 'If this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating.'"

"Where does it say that?"

"There. Look."

She took the book back, her eyes drawn to lines on the page underlined in red by the last reader, by Monika. Hermione read them aloud. "You gods, look down, And from your sacred vials pour your graces upon my daughter's head!"

She ran her finger over the lines. She had found herself, hidden in her mother's book, and with it a promise that she was hidden elsewhere, everywhere, even in Monika's most charmed of memories. Hermione bowed her head.

"It's you," he said for her when he saw she couldn't speak. "It's your mother and it's you."

The book had given Hermione the resolve to begin practical preparations for attempting to reverse the memory charm. Monika herself knew she was missing something that only magic could bring back. She didn't understand it literally, but it was enough of an insight to make a start. Hermione's first step was the same as it always was: studying. It was too stifling to read in the flat so they took a blanket and her bag full of books and set off into the cool of the woods at the back of the Wilkins's property.

The yard was separated from the forest by a low berm of field stones piled up generations before. Beyond the stones, the woods opened up into a mossy glade under wide canopied trees next to a small brook of clear brown water. It could not have been less like their first woodland walk together, at night in the Forbidden Forest when they were children, watching for werewolves, lugging lanterns almost too big to lift.

With the blanket spread out, Malfoy lay on his stomach reading his own paperback copy of The Winter's Tale while Hermione went over her books of charms and enchantments - again.

"I'm out of practice," she said, dropping the book from in front of her face. "We've used so little magic since we came here - mostly opening doors and housework cheats. We need to try something with sparks and some heat to it. Something that challenges our minds, that would get us into trouble if anyone else were to see it."

Malfoy looked up from his book. "Maybe we should wait until the town goes to bed then. Shouldn't be much longer."

She swatted his arm again. "Don't tell me you're bored with Upper Raleigh already."

He sat up, facing her. "It's a good place to do some thinking, actually. And I've got a proposal for you."

"Bit late for that."

"No, I mean, before we begin with your mother, maybe we should finish with mine. It might help. There may be a connection we haven't seen yet because we keep running away from it. I said I didn't trust her not to hurt you, but I never asked you if contacting my mother, facing her instead of fleeing her, finding out what she's trying to say to us, is that a risk YOU can accept. I've been acting like it's all up to me and it's not. This isn't my project. It's yours." He bowed his head. "So you make the decision."

She blinked, closed her charms book over her finger. "How would we summon her?"

For the rest of the evening, they planned, finally deciding that if they were to approach Narcissa, it would have to be done away from the Wilkins. If something went wrong - magically wrong - they needed to be isolated. At eight o'clock, after the park rangers locked the gate, they would apparate to the cold, grey beach. They'd bring the diamond stickpin with them and wait for Narcissa to detect that three things she needed to contact them - Draco, something from the house of Malfoy, and Hermione - had come together again.

The sun was setting into the trees in the west as they arrived with a snap on the darkening beach. They sat on the sand, well back from the water, and Malfoy took an envelope from his jacket pocket.

"No running away this time," Hermione assured him.

His forehead was lined with worry. "Are you sure? I can't promise you safety."

She took a deep breath. "If it'll means things will go better for my parents, it doesn't matter if I'm safe."

He nodded, and opened the envelope. Hermione still didn't smell anything but the sea. Malfoy always sensed the strong floral scent of narcissus first. She watched him closely in the low light. He tipped the pin out of the envelope and into the palm of his hand. "Right. Now cover it with your hand, Hermione."

She closed her hand over his. Silence.

"Is she coming?"

"Not yet."

More silence.

"Nothing?"

"Not yet. But I hardly think her aim was to send us to hold hands on the beach at sunset, so just wait a bit." He breathed deeply. "The wind's moving the air too fast, I can't catch her scent but - "

"Shh!" Hermione had heard a familiar sound, a sound she remembered from the manor, like a silver spoon striking a crystal glass. Her hand recoiled from the pin.

Uncovered in the palm of Malfoy's hand, the diamond was lit from within, dim and blue. Breaking through its face was a single crack, jagged and white like a bolt of electricity. The clinking sounded again, just as another fissure appeared in the once flawless diamond. The cracks were coming faster now, the entire surface of the diamond splintering, falling away in tiny grains, spilling from his hand onto the sand below. As they fell, the wind began to swirl, circling the spot on the sand where Malfoy, Hermione, and the heirloom pin were gathered together. The wind sped in a flying vortex around them, sucking sand from the ground. In a moment, it was a sandstorm, whirling around them, wind shrieking, sand stinging, blinding.

Narscissa had come. The flying beach sand was mixed with broken shells, sharp edges. Something slashed Malfoy's face, cutting his cheek, dark blood appearing on his white face. Hermione moved to scream but could only gasp before the sand choked her. Malfoy had fallen to his knees, still gripping the metal of the pin in his hand. Hermione saw him, cringing and bleeding, before another picture superimposed itself on top of him. He was no longer kneeling in a sandstorm but retreating through a doorway in an old house, bleeding from the face, looking back, led away…

The scene was different for Malfoy. In the sand, he could discern moving pictures, animated sculptures - wands and lights, hands, faces and long sharp teeth. At last, his mother's face formed before him. "Reveal what you have done," something only vaguely like Narcissa's voice said. "Reveal it."

The wind swirled fiercer than ever, blowing the sand images clear of his vision. Where was Hermione? The air was too full of sand to speak, to call for her, or see her. He thrashed his arms through the biting, gritty air but they stayed empty.

Mother, what have you done?

With one final blast of wind, the sandstorm blew itself down the beach and back into the ground. The noise and debris cleared and Malfoy came to his senses, one hand rubbing sand from his eyelashes, finding himself flat on his back in soft, cool sand, his right arm pinned to the ground somehow. He rolled onto his side to free himself, frantic to get up and find Hermione before he noticed that what was holding his arm down was her body, motionless beside him.

He swore. "Hermione? Granger? Hey!"

He couldn't tell if she was breathing and felt for her neck, that spot he was coming to know well, where her carotid pulse beat against her skin, especially when he'd said or done something to make her blush. He bent over her, almost lying on top of her as he found her pulse there now, strong and warm.

"Hermione, wake up."

She opened her eyes, startled to find him so close, her finger reaching up to touch the sand-crusted blood on his cheek. Her eyes tracked away from the cut to meet his eyes.

"It was you," she said. "You let the chandelier down in Malfoy Manor and saved me from Bellatrix Lestrange."

He collapsed onto his back, breathless, speechless.

She sat up beside him, freeing his arm. "I saw it. As its heir, you have power over that house too. You used it to save me. And your mother knew you did it. She kept it a secret, or your aunt would have slaughtered the both of us, right there on the marble hearth of your ancestral home - while your helpless father looked on."

He sat up too, hugging his knees. "Yes, I did. Of course I did. Don't you remember? It wasn't Bellatrix you had to fear. It was that creature. They were going to feed you to a werewolf, to that Fenrir Greyback. He was going to eat you, like the snake ate - no, no more."

He was shaking, holding his knees to his chest and trembling on the sand next her. She curled one arm around his shoulders, holding him tightly, drawing him close. "It doesn't matter who wanted to hurt me. It matters that it was you who saved me. Thank you, Draco."

He shivered against her. "I don't deserve thanks. I did it for me. I couldn't stand anymore."

She joined her arms around him, encircling him, pressing her forehead against the side of his head, sand from their hair raining down between them. "That makes it all the more thank-worthy. You did it because of who you are."

He was exhausted, hurt, and didn't restrain his body as it leaned into her arms, as he rocked his head against hers, savouring her presence, her touch, her kindness. She held him until he had to cough against the sand in his throat, breaking her hold.

She sat back, leaning on her palms in the sand. "I just don't understand why it took your mother throwing us into a supercollider for me to find out about this."

He coughed out the strange word. "Supercollider?"

"Never mind, Malfoy. Let's go home."

They managed to get back inside the flat without meeting the Wilkins and having to explain being so thoroughly covered in sand. It would all be shaken out, swept up, and washed away eventually, but the gash on Malfoy's cheek was another matter. He sat on the bed in his sleeping clothes as Hermione swabbed the wound with cold water.

She clucked her tongue. "What are we going to say when my parents ask what's happened to your face?"

He hummed. "Shaving cut?"

She frowned. "No, it's too high on your cheek. It'll heal faster with some wand work but do you think that will make it more or less likely to scar?"

"It's a bit rich for me to be worrying about scars now." He pulled at the neck of his T-shirt, flashing the spectacular scar left from Harry's sectumsempra hex.

She shuddered. "Definitely a low-point for the chosen one. We rowed over it, you know. It went on for days. And I still don't agree with how the school handled it. Detention for a near manslaughter? Harry's lucky your father was in Azkaban when it happened or he might have ended up like Buckbeak."

Malfoy shuddered himself now. "Ah, Buckbeak. Definitely a low point for me."

She snickered. "And even after all that, you still didn't turn Harry over to the Dark Lord when the snatchers brought us to your house."

He nudged her wet cloth away from his face. "It won't work, Hermione. Pretending I was on your side all along. It won't work."

She had found a healing balm in her bag - a good one from a respected British potion-maker and was dabbing it across his cheekbone with one finger. "Maybe so. But it does help me like you better."

He jumped under her fingertip. "Like me better? You like me - at all?"

"Don't be dense, Draco. Of course I like you. Remember what we agreed? Kindness, civility, warmth? When you treat someone like that for more than a few hours, you can't help but like them." She re-corked the balm. "And that means you must like me too."

He fingered his wound, frowned. "What do you mean, 'like' - "

"It's simple. You like me, Malfoy. There's no shame in it. And you can think about why while I tell you what I like about you."

"Granger-"

"I noticed this morning that I like how the sun looks on your hair."

It might have been an accident, but he flipped his hair as he said, "Everyone likes that. It hardly counts."

She folded her arms. "Well then, I like that your knowledge set highlights the gaps in mine and makes me want to work harder."

He nodded. "The Shakespeare."

"For starters, yes. I also like that you listen and let me persuade you to do things."

He grimaced. "That makes me sound witless."

"And you care about my plans enough to make them your own. Like when you asked me to marry you."

"Don't say it like that -"

"Stop resisting, Malfoy. Here's one you can't argue with. I like," she leaned forward, toward his neck, eyelids lowered, her face so close to his skin he could feel the drag of air against it as she inhaled, "I like the way you smell."

There was no rejoinder, just a stunned quiet. As the banter broke down, she saw herself openly relishing him in a physical way, as if all her shame and propriety had been sandblasted away. What had she done? What new element had come into creation in the supercollider on the beach? She had said liking him was simple. Maybe she was wrong. Her posture jerked upright, her hand covering her throat again. She could hardly dare to look at him, as he sat as if petrified on the bed, mouth slightly open in shock.

"Right," she said. "I'm - I'm going up to the house to say goodnight to my parents."

He still hadn't moved a millimetre as the door slammed shut. In the empty attic, he wondered what he would have told her if she stayed to hear what he liked about her. Maybe his answers would have been different before she'd sniffed so greedily at his neck - more like the Gryffindor ode she deserved. But at this moment, he was thinking about how he liked the softness of her hands on him, and the curve of her forehead against his, and the way he didn't realize her prettiness didn't matter until her prettiness truly didn't matter - her presence was enough.

He reached across the bed and found the pillow she had slept on last night, plunged his face into it, and breathed. There was her smell. Did he like it? By the stars, yes. Yes he did. It was like happiness and comfort but with a darkness to it that rolled in his gut, a low embarrassing thing that explained his hurt and anger when she shrank from sharing a bed with him. Along with everything else she made him feel, here now was desire.

Tossing her pillow back onto her side of the bed, he lay down and closed his eyes, desperate to be asleep before she came back and put herself to bed.


	20. Twenty

The new normal was tense, days spent mostly apart while Hermione worked at the clinic with her parents and Malfoy subtly magicked through the daily to-do lists of minor renovations Wendell entrusted to him, delighted to find a competent handyman in his tenant after all. If it had occurred to Malfoy to think of himself as a "house-husband" he would have hated it, but he was raised by a father who had never had a proper job and the role of the vaguely scholarly gentleman of leisure was one he slid into easily, apologizing for nothing.

When she came home from work in the middle of the week fumbling with a large gift-wrapped box and a glossy bag decorated in pink and black, he was only too happy to leave off reading to help with her load. She let him take the box but pulled the bag out of his reach, setting it down behind the door, covering it with her jacket.

"What on earth is this?" he asked, shaking the large box.

Hermione smirked. "It's crockery mixed with electricity. The Muggles use it to cook food while they're away at work. My mother has some lovely recipes."

He was unconvinced. "What are we going to do with it?"

"Nothing. Its main function is to serve as a wedding present. It's from the other girls at the clinic, their way of showing support for our - arrangement."

"Right," he said, craning his neck to find the other package he remembered seeing. "Everyone knows about us, I suppose. The Gralfoy Affair is not so much a scandal as a society page yawn by now."

"Gossip has its own legs. It's not like I ran an announcement in the Daily Prophet," she said.

He was smirking now. "No? Why not?"

"Because - Malfoy, don't!"

He had turned the box upside down, as if to inspect it properly, sending the heavy electric slow cooker squealing out of its Styrofoam packing. She lunged forward to catch it before it fell completely out of the box. But it was a trap. When her arms were full, he used his powers of quick, fluid, complicated motions to let go of the box, lift her jacket off the ground, and pull the contents out of the black and pink bag. It was a small strappy handful of fabric. He held it between his fingers, filmy and shiny.

"Huh. Gryffindor colours."

"I didn't buy that myself," she said, hefting the pot onto the table, snatching at the tiny nightgown in Malfoy's hand. "It's another wedding present from the girls. They think they're funny."

She jumped at it but he held the nightgown over her head. He squinted at it, his fingers sliding over its lace and satin, not sure which end of it was up. "This is also in support of our arrangement?"

"Just - let me have it. I'll get rid of it."

"Wait a moment. I'm still not -"

"Malfoy - "

"Get a proper look -"

"Draco, please."

There was something like panic in her voice. He left off teasing her, handing her both the nightgown and its bag. "Sorry," he said. "Didn't seem - so serious."

Her face was flushed red, her eyes near tears. It was clearly serious. She turned her back to him, throwing the nightgown into its bag and pitching it into the bin with enough force to tip the whole thing over, spilling rubbish onto the floor. She swore, but only mildly.

She was stooping to gather up the mess when he caught her by the waist, leaning back, his motion straightening her posture, pulling her spine against his chest. She was already flustered and now she almost completely lost her breath. They hadn't touched each other much since the night of the sandstorm supercollider on the beach. Since then, every bit of physical contact had become heavy, charged with questions, and also with answers. Touch between them was no longer an exchange to be taken lightly.

And now, with his simple act of pulling her away from the bin, her body was running ahead of her mind, propelled by his hands on her waist, his chest at her back. It was something like what had happened when she had smelled his skin, first when he was asleep, and later when he was awake, watching her. Each time something like this happened, it became more and more difficult for her to maintain her composure, to stifle her responses to him. She had already lost the fight this time. Her body was leaning into his, her head tucking itself beneath his chin, where she could feel his breath on her scalp.

Her heart heaved inside her as he spoke into her hair. "I'm sorry, Hermione. Don't be mad."

"None of this is fair to you," she choked. "You're stuck here with me and my parents in a little Muggle town far from everything and everyone. You could be loving someone right now, healing, making a home, but instead you're here pretending with me. I promised this would be therapeutic for you, but - it's not healthy. What was that you called yourself, lying in your bed in Malfoy Manor? A healthy young man? I'm awful to keep you here in this house, deprived of proper relationships. It's unnatural."

He laughed softly against the crown of her head. "Granger, don't treat me like some exotic, trapped pet. I'm not kept by anyone. I'm in control of my own life and I'm where I want to be for now." He unclasped his hands from around her waist, stepping away. "Let's clean up."

The rest of the evening she was quiet, sitting at the table over the books and diaries she had used to jot notes on creating her parents' memory charm in the first place, when she was still in school. The sooner she undid the magic, the sooner they could all go back to life as it had been. And even if the magic failed, she'd have no more reason to keep Malfoy with her. She would go back to work in Britain, the annulment could proceed, and he could move on to being a healthy young man with someone.

The thought should have given her the drive and urgency she needed to move forward. Instead, the idea of letting Malfoy go seemed to sabotage all her progress, leaving her trudging in circles inside her own head, reading the same passages over and over without remembering what they said, staring at the dark, un-curtained window panes, or worse, catching herself staring at him.

From across the room, he looked up from the Muggle-wand's screen to find her watching him. Unfazed, he said, "Let's try it tonight."

"What?"

He sat up from his lazy reclining pose against the bed's headboard. "That challenging magic you wanted to practice before you work on your parents. It's dark now. Let's head into the woods and try it."

As usual, work and activity cleared her mind. She was no longer brooding as, by the light of their wands, they walked to the stone berm at the back of the yard. She held his arm, stabilizing each other as they climbed over the tricky round rocks that shifted and clicked as they made their way. From there, they wandered without a path in dense, dark trees, brittle undergrowth snapping beneath their shoes.

Summers are short in Canada. The season was already half finished, and yet every evening, when the sun went down, the air felt more and more like autumn. In a few weeks, the clear brown water in the creek would twist and knot itself into its winter ice, but not yet. At the sound of trickling water, Hermione and Malfoy knew to stop in the glade.

She mimed cracking her knuckles, shook out her hair, and flourished the glowing end of her wand. "Here's something you may never have seen fully formed before, Malfoy. Took a lot of work for me to learn this and I'd hate to lose the knack for it. Stand clear. It's been too long and I am going to cast my patronus."

"Go on and cast it," he said. "But what makes you think I've never seen a fully formed patronus? I was a pure-hearted child once."

"Of course you were. It's just that they never taught this in school - not in classes, anyway."

He scoffed. "Come on, Granger. If it occurred to you and Potter to hold supplementary defense classes right before war broke out, how could it not have occurred to the Death Eaters to do the same for their exploited children while we were still fresh and innocent?"

"Well then, Malfoy. What is it? What form does your patronus take?"

He rolled his shoulders inside his coat, laughed but miserably. "I'd rather not discuss it."

She pounced, springing toward him, taking him by the arm again. "Now I really must know. What is it: a skunk, a hog, something warty?"

He twisted weakly against her hold. "None of that. I told you, I won't discuss it. And anyway, you should already know what form it takes. You'd figure it out if you'd stop chattering and think about it for one moment."

She hummed. "Something I already know. Something already associated with you. It must be - oh, not a dragon."

He smirked. "No."

"Then...a peacock!"

"Nice try. My father's is a peacock, and my mother's is a peahen, naturally. But mine is not a bird at all, exotic or otherwise. Broke their hearts, really."

She pulled her eyebrows together. "Does it swim then?"

He scoffed. "Who in the world has a patronus that swims?"

"Expecto patronum!" And there it was. Hermione's otter patronus had appeared, sleek and lithe, gliding through the air trailing silvery bubbles. "Isn't she beautiful?"

Malfoy staggered out of the otter's path, his arms spread wide to steady himself. "What is it?"

"It's an otter, of course."

"It's a swimming ferret."

"Oh, it's nothing like one."

"It's almost exactly like one."

"How can you - "

"Expecto Patronum!" And from his wand, scampering and clawing the air alongside Hermione's otter, appeared a shining white ferret.

Hermione screamed with laughter. "Yes, Malfoy! It's perfect." Delighted, she congratulated him with a hug. "Look at them. Well done, Draco Malfoy. Oh, how did the mother-author let a connection like this slip by? What will she do now?"

On the mossy ground beside him, her arms still lightly ringed around his waist over his wool coat, she hopped and cheered as the nimble creatures darted and twirled around each other, lighting the leaves on the trees. Their wispy glow was dying, she was letting Malfoy go.

Not this time.

His arms clamped around her, gathering her against himself, raising her onto her tiptoes. He heard her breath catch as the forest went dark.

Neither of them spoke. She dared to raise her chin toward his face, always so readable, but she was barely able to see him, his eyes little more than shadows, his brow, chin and cheeks faintly reflecting moonlight, and from his nose and mouth, heat. It was enough to guide her as she raised herself even taller, kissing his cheek, not playfully, as it had been before, but with meaning.

This small, warm kiss, he understood, was her consent. His eyes closed at the touch of it, the drive to claim it, to act on it hardly bearable. But he waited an instant longer before bending toward her, brushing his nose against hers. And when she didn't recoil, he bent lower, his mouth moving softly along hers, lips still closed, letting her know for certain what would happen next in case she couldn't follow, and had to escape. This was fragile, impossible, and to ruin it now would be catastrophic. What would become of him, in this dark Nova Scotia town, back in Britain, anywhere, if all of this shattered at his touch, and he couldn't be with her anymore?

She didn't retreat. Still on tiptoe, she tilted her head and waited. He turned his face again, moving back toward her centre, lips parted this time, fitting into hers, the warm wet inner edge of her lip tipped open to receive his. She pressed into him, sealing the connection. A breath of ecstatic relief slipped out of him forcefully enough that his voice sounded, wordless between them. Afraid he was withdrawing, she leaned into him again, arms around his torso, palms pressed flat against his back. He stayed with her. She inhaled deeply, nose against his cheek, breathing in that lush smell of his, one that had come to mean new life, hope for days of challenge and courage even though the war was over.

Nothing of the future could be certain yet, not even what they would say or what they would do when this connection was ended. So they held on, alight in that moment, like twin patronuses flaring to shining life together, for however long they could.


	21. Twenty-one

The most logical course of action to take after letting Draco Malfoy kiss her in the woods would have been to open healthy, adult discussions about the implications of this real development for their pretend marriage. But the logical course is not always the natural course, and the natural course was the one which kept Hermione in the woods, speechless, eyes closed, kissing him back for as long as he would bear it.

He hadn't been close to anyone in this way since before his incarceration at St. Mungo's, and he was keen to bear quite a lot of it, racing into the rhythm and flow, the warm and wet intimacy of his mouth on hers and in hers. She had a wordless answer for every bit of pressure, movement, and friction he pressed against her, as if she knew him better than anyone did, as if he was good enough to let into herself like this. He didn't care if he was good enough or not -- not right now. He needed her, and he sensed the same from her as he heard her voice in her sigh when he turned his head, his face angled differently, closer, hungrier. Yes, this. There was a high thudding pulse in his chest, a quavering exchange of their ragged breaths. It was something like past kisses with other people, but for once, he wasn't a boy kissing a girl with his hands and face. For the first time, he was kissing a woman not with smug teenaged bravado but with something tender, cracked open on the inside, until it ached.

When she was sure he wasn't retreating from her, Hermione's hands slipped away from where they were clamped on his back, rising over his chest and shoulders, his breath catching with every inch they traveled. When her fingers threaded through his hair, his lips smiled against hers. Yes, this was still the same. It never took them long to reach for his hair. He'd never let it grow so long before and she smoothed the loose ends between her fingertips before thrusting her hands all the way to his scalp.

That was when he yelped. "Granger, your hands are freezing."

She reeled toward him, still holding his head as he broke away. "They'll warm up soon."

"Not like this," he said, tucking their arms between them, taking her hands in his, blowing warm air onto them. He followed it with kisses along the lines of her knuckles. The sight of him bowing his head to kiss her hands disordered her pulse all over again.

"It's never going to work," she said. "My blood isn't flowing the way it's supposed to."

Even in the dark, she could tell his eyes had widened at her statement.

"No, I didn't mean - that's - that's not a lascivious comment - "

"No, of course not," he was laughing.

If he hadn't held her hands, she would have swatted him. As it was, she nudged him hard with one shoulder. "Shut up, Malfoy."

"Gladly." And he kissed her again, over their intertwined fingers, more sure than the first time, deeper, more like himself. 

This was what she wanted, and she rose into it again, open and yielding as he possessed her with just his mouth. She clung to him in the living darkness of the woods. For as long as she stayed connected to him like this, he was hers. But what about when she wasn't?

She sighed when they paused a second time. In truth, the logical course was her natural course after all, and it couldn't be ignored for long. "How can we go home like this?" she asked him.

He pressed his forehead against hers and said, "Very carefully."

\----------------------------

There was bright light in the yard when they arrived outside the flat. Wendell was wheeling a furniture dolly along the path between the buildings, something puffy and brown strapped to it. He explained that he had found more furniture for the attic and needed to return the truck he borrowed to move it by the morning. The puffy brownness was a sofa. Since they couldn't levitate it without him noticing, Draco and Hermione helped Wendell lug it up the stairs.

"There you have it," he said, sliding it into place between the kitchen and the bed. "Somewhere for Draco to sleep when he's been misbehaving."

Wendell laughed at his own joke as Malfoy flushed deeply red.

Hermione threw herself between them. "He's only joking, Draco," she said. "Everyone knows it's me who misbehaves. Don't they Wendell?"

He laughed even louder at this, though he didn't actually find it funny at all. "He took it too hard, Niki," he told his wife after he'd returned to the house. "Something isn't right over there. That face of his looks like it's always on the verge of apologizing to me for something."

"Pish-tosh, it's just his pride. It serves you right for teasing him. Hermione seems happy enough with him and that's what matters. Smart girl. Though a little needy for attention and praise with me, but I am her boss, after all. It's rather sweet, in its way. And with you - you've got to stop spoiling her or she'll never want to go back to her real father in Saskatchewan. All the food you leave for her, the bridal shower you had the girls at the office throw for her, and look at you now, coming in at this hour after hoisting furniture in the dark for her."

He hummed. "I stand by it. I left feeling I'd delivered that sofa for them in the nick of time."

In the flat, Hermione sprawled on the sofa. It smelled like the dental clinic, was hopelessly mired in the shabby-chic aesthetic of years past, but otherwise, it was not bad at all and long enough for her to stretch out on it. She sat up. "Come try it, Malfoy."

He sat down, but on the bed. "How did he do that?"

"My Dad?" she beamed. "How did he know to conjure another sleeping surface for us on the same day that…"

"Yes. How does a man who doesn't even remember he has a daughter tune in so perfectly to the changing status of her - marriage?"

The idea pleased her and she grinned even as she waved the coincidence away. "He's our landlord, furnishing his flat."

"In the dead of night," Malfoy finished. "But at least he doesn't interfere with violent magic from halfway across the world, I suppose."

"Come on. Your mother was just trying to help."

Malfoy scoffed. "Help herself maybe. The sooner she gets a member of the golden trio in the family, the sooner her reconciliation hearings wrap up sweetly and she and my father can get back to the manor. Don't give her too much credit, Hermione. She's done nothing for you that didn't also help herself."

She rose from the sofa to sit beside him on the bed. She'd thought the same thing herself. Of course she had. "It doesn't matter," she said anyway, hooking her arm through his, leaning against him. "You didn't save me from the chandelier as insurance against the day your parents might need friends on the other side. You did it because you were different from them, even back then."

He patted her hand but said, "I did it because I'm intolerably squeamish when it comes to human beings getting eaten."

"And I like that about you, immensely." She perched her chin on his shoulder, looked up at his profile. With one finger, she traced the sharp jawline facing her, watching him swallow hard in response. "Call it whatever you want, Malfoy. It's still beautiful. And if you weren't already connected to me by saving my life in the manor, you might still be at St. Mungo's, stuck in an Innocentia enchantment with no one left to reach you. I don't care if your mother takes advantage of any of this. She's welcome to it. It's worth it."

Sitting next to him on the bed, she moved to kiss him again.

He groaned as he turned away. "Careful, Hermione. Your dad is annoying, but he's not wrong."

She laughed. "What does that mean?"

He took her hand from his face and held it tightly. "It means that unless - unless you want to - tonight - I need to sleep on the sofa."

The high colour in her face blanched for the first time that evening.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I've been locked up for a long time. I'm trying not to push but - you said so yourself. I'm a healthy young man, and a married one at that. It's - difficult."

She sat back and shoved him with both hands, joking. "Oh, so the Hogwarts rumors are true, are they? About you and your healthy appetite for girls?"

He pulled her close again. "No, they absolutely are not. I'd like to say it's because I was a decent boy but it was more thanks to Death Eater rules about not sullying bloodlines with under-aged partying."

She shoved him again. "That's disgusting."

"Yes, and over. Whenever you want to improve the Malfoy family bloodlines, just say the word."

She laughed against his shoulder, though the matter was serious. With this evening, the pretend nature of their marriage had been thrown into confusion. It had started as a simple binary choice: married or not married. It was a real legal arrangement, but one that could be flicked on and off as necessary, as convenient. It was meant to affect nothing else but the project of restoring the Wilkins's memories.

But things turned out not to be simple, and they were left between two other options which were not binary at all: in love or not in love. Between these two positions there seemed to be a vast gradient of possibilities, and neither Hermione nor Draco was sure yet where they were currently plotted on it. Once they defined that position, a new binary would present itself: forever, or not forever. And this was the choice that would affect everything.

Until it was resolved, Draco Malfoy would kiss his not-quite-pretend wife goodnight, and sleep on the sofa. But he would allow himself one more new indulgence. Late in the night, it began to rain, and by morning the large, still un-curtained window at the eastern end of the flat was streaked with raindrops dragged across the glass by a high wind, and lit with grey light. There was not much brightness to it but it disturbed him all the same, gasping awake as if afraid the entire night, from the time he sat dozing with over the Muggle-wand before he suggested they go to the woods to practice spells, might have all been a dream.

His breath calmed as he felt the brown sofa beneath him. If this ghastly piece of Muggle furniture was real, then the rest might be real too. Across the room, in the bed, shifted to one side as if he was still there with her, was Hermione. He had studied her in her sleep so many times since they left St. Mungo's - at the kitchen table in the manor, on the airplane, in the motel, on the beach. This time, he would risk touching her as she slept. He knelt beside the bed, looking into her face. She didn't look any different from the time before he'd kissed her in the forest. Not even her lips showed any signs of it. His unchecked reaction was to be disappointed. Perhaps it was a Black family failing, wanting things to be marked.

At the thought, he shrank back, sinking from kneeling to sitting on the floor. Hermione Granger - how dare he, chandelier or not?

But impulse control was another of the virtues Draco Malfoy was still mastering. It was the reason he sent himself to sleep on the sofa, and the reason why not even a fit of self-loathing at his unworthiness stopped him from pressing one thumb - the one he had pierced to open the gates of Malfoy Manor - against the skin of her cheek as she slept, as he'd wanted to do since his first day as her companion. She stirred at the touch, eyes closed but nestling her face into his hand, the sleeping habits of a woman with a history of long-term partner - one who wasn't him. Her voice was murmuring wordlessly in her throat. If he didn't run, maybe he'd hear her say Weasley's name, half-asleep, unmoored.

"It's cold," she said, eyes still closed. "Mmm - Malfoy, come to bed. It's too cold."

He grinned at her in her sleep, pressed his lips against her forehead, and went back to the sofa.


	22. Twenty-two

Literature was good enough most of the time, but other times, arithmancy was better.

That's what Draco Malfoy told Hermione when she came home to him the day he received a package by albatross - the magical post system long-ranging enough to traverse oceans The delivery bird had been huge, white with sleek, broad wings beaded with rain, bearing a parcel so expensive it might be possible to notice slightly more shelf space in one corner the Malfoy family bank vault.

"Wait until my father hears about this," he whistled as the enormous seabird winged away.

The device inside the package was something like a Muggle optical spectrometer, a rare, magically enhanced research apparatus called a spectral-meter meant for working with colour, light, reflection in spell development. Having one sent here, to their flat in rural Halifax County, was a risk he took, an investment he made based on a particularly intense discussion about the Wilkins's memory charm. He had asked Hermione to describe to him in detail exactly what she had done at every step of developing and casting the original memory spell.

"Tell me everything, the entire memory of it. Use me like a penseive. Start from the time you first imagined such a spell might even be possible and don't leave anything out. It'll be better than just poring over the same old notes. That's getting you nowhere."

She took a deep breath. "The whole story? You won't be bored? Or mad? There will be Ronald references."

He shrugged. "I'll probably be alright. But just to be sure tell me with my head in your lap. That'll make it nicer."

"Such a self-sacrificing man."

"Yes, well." He leaned over on the sofa, settling the back of his head against the tops of her thighs as she threaded her fingers into his hair. "Let's have it."

The idea of casting the memory charm began working in her brain at the same time she was processing the reality of dropping out of Hogwarts in her seventh year. Everything was violent and unfair and so epic she mentioned the smaller concerns of her own family to no one but Ron. Maybe she meant for him to argue when she told him about the memory charm, to be horrified at the thought of breaking family connections when his family was clearly vital to his own happiness.

But he accepted the idea of breaking up the Granger family without question, almost with an eagerness to have her all the more to himself. He hadn't said so in words but she had sensed it in the way the pitch and speed of his speech had risen as he encouraged her - the way he'd stepped closer to her, laid a warm hand on her shoulder, bringing her further inside. It had been comforting, touching, verging on the romance she had craved from him, reading it into everything during those frightening times.

From that point, however, he had stepped away, as a show of respectful confidence in her abilities, perhaps - another way of saying "Hermione, you're the best at spells" - and left her to herself to get the dangerous magic right, imagining and executing it on her own.

Malfoy snorted. "No help from Weasley? Probably for the best."

She tapped her fingertip sharply against his forehead in reproval. "Any help would have meant a lot, especially at the time. But yes, now that I'm here undoing it without him, it is for the best."

She laughed, quietly, bitterly. Maybe that was the moment that doomed her and Ron, the moment he nudged her forward to do the spell, but didn't follow her. Maybe if the memory charm had been his work too, she would have needed to bring him with her to undo it, and everything would be different.

She hadn't said anything about her aborted future with Ron out loud, and maybe it was a coincidence that Malfoy nestled his cheek against her stomach at that moment, like a lazy, white cat. Everything would indeed have been different if Ron had been part of this spell.

She might never have been with someone who made her feel like she did at this moment. It had been thrilling to be noticed by famous, athletic Viktor Krum, but she had never felt close to him. Giving him her first kiss certainly hadn't made them close, though she had wagered quite a lot on the prospect that it might. Being with Ron had the closeness she was looking for, and their love for each other had certainly been more than friendship. Her desire for him had been real, but it hadn't been thrilling. It had been the opposite of thrilling - a warm comfort in a world altogether too full of dreadful excitement.

Draco Malfoy was both - everything. As he came closer and closer to her every day, he thrilled her more and more, even now, as she did nothing more with him than sit blinking in the rainy grey light over his upturned face.

In the quiet, he opened one eye, raised one dark eyebrow. "Go on. Tell me the rest."

She shook herself and went on.

Perhaps because the notion of giving up her parents was so horrible, she kept it out of mind, fretting instead over the other loss, the loss of Hogwarts, the school she was leaving unfinished against nearly everything in her character. She had been in the cupboard of her bedroom at home, packing away her school things, when she found her original Hogwarts admission letter, marked with the school crest, divided into its four house colours. When it first arrived, she hadn't been sorted into a house yet. Knowing nothing of it, the colours hadn't mattered at all. One was as good as any other.

That funny little Hogwarts spectrum of light and colour - could a mind be like that? A mind that, as far as it's capable, reflects everything that matters to it, like a beam of white light - could that white light be refracted through a spell, the colours stacked and separated, and one colour removed from the rest? Did her existence have a wavelength in her parents' minds, a colour she could magically hide from them, leaving the rest of the spectrum intact? She couldn't leave a rift open in their mental spectrums, but maybe she could insert the identities of Wendell and Monika Wilkins into the empty slot.

She set to work calculating, experimenting with light and colour, all night for weeks, alone in her bedroom as her parents slept. These methods were another reason not to include Ron and Harry in the witchcrafting of the memory charm. They approached their magic like a sport. For them it was a matter of practice, dogged repetition, of will and focus, bursts of energy and muscle memory. But there were other ways to approach magic that were intellectual rather than athletic. They demanded practice and heart but also research, calculation, and a kind of concentration her best friends would not touch outside of mandatory schoolwork.

On the sofa, Malfoy sat up, his palm open. "Show me your notes."

At the kitchen table, under the electric Muggle lights, they read through her notebook together, beginning with her initial, experimental figures, progressing toward the final formula, the one that she had used in the end.

"It's good work," she said as he lowered the book, nodding his head. "I know it is. But I don't dare overlook the little things that went wrong: winding up in Canada, Mum's new fussy righteousness, The Winter's Tale book, Dad's weird mistrust of you - "

"Completely explainable without magical intervention, actually," Draco smirked.

"Still, it's scary. What could go astray next time?" She pulled her notes toward herself again. "How do I know what the noise is in all of this, and what another blast of it might mean for their minds? And then I'm caught in this awful cycle of doubt that undermines my power to do the spell. It's like apparation: intention is everything."

It was a rut, and to jar her out of it, he found and ordered the spectral-meter. If she could monitor wavelengths over the course of a spell - see them unfolding with a device that made them visible, it might give her the confidence to move forward. And the time to move had come. The summer was ending and the Wilkins would be expecting them to leave, back to Hermione's fictitious dental school in Britain after their "real" wedding ceremony with her "real" parents in a place called "Saskatchewan" which still sounded fake to Draco.

The spectral-meter was set up on the table in the flat when she came home. She dropped her bag on the floor at the sight of it. Malfoy sat beside it, buffing every smudge and speck from its heavy crystal prism with a soft cloth. "Look what I found. A school in Switzerland had it listed for sale so - "

She had crossed the floor, arms extended, closing around him as she sat down in his lap, kissing both of his cheeks before tucking her face into his neck and shoulder.

"Granger - hey. It's not that I don't think your calculations aren't brilliant," he was rushing to say, afraid she might be about to cry against him. "I just thought that an objective measure of how the spell works might bolster your courage to attempt the reversal. Let me show you - "

She sat back, looking at him, her face unguarded. She had never felt more certain that telling him she loved him would be telling him the truth than she felt at that moment. He returned her look, but while there was something knowing in his face, there was also something panicked in it. Not today.

She tipped forward and kissed him, breaking away to tell him simply, "Thank you."

\----------------------------------

The Australian wizarding community was hard to find. It was more fluidly integrated with its surrounding Muggles than the stodgy, over-dressed, classist social divisions to which Ron and George Weasley were accustomed would have allowed. The Australian ministry of magic believed people were creative and open-minded enough to accept the exceptional when they happened upon it, and the cultures intermingled without much interference. It was something they had learned making different, tragic mistakes in their own past.

For weeks, the Weasley brothers had been traveling the coastline, camping on beaches. At last, they found a pub hidden in an impossibly small lane near Bondi Beach. The Brown Besom was intended to be strictly for wizards and witches which meant it was, of course, run by emigrated British people.

Tonight, George stood in the center of the room, in full business-mogul mode, barking through demonstrations of Weasley products for an enthusiastic crowd of Australians. Ron was at the bar, sober but with his head slumped against his hand, his fist closed around the Communication Compact. Most days, he was coping well enough, learning to surf on the water and the air, meeting the people George met. Today was different.

Some days, it was too hard to believe he and Hermione were over, and he would keep watch over the Compact just in case. That's not why he held it in his hand today. No, today his mother had albatross-ed them a copy of the Daily Prophet. She had meant well, trying to nail a coffin around a part of his life that ought to be buried. On page four was an update on the Gralfoy Affair. The story was not a society page snooze, as Malfoy dared to hope, but an active scandal, stoked now by the account of a Daily Prophet informant who had been on her way to a holiday in America when her ship put in anchor on the east coast of Canada, in Halifax Harbour. It happened to be on the same day Wendell and Monika had taken the Malfoys into the city to see the sights. The informant managed to snap a picture of Draco and Hermione walking on a pier. It wasn't a good photo, not at all professional - they were out of step, not even looking at each other - but Amund Rentz wrote it up as the confirmation of every scandalous thing that had been printed about the Gralfoy Affair to date.

And why not, Ron thought. The Daily Prophet didn't even know how deep the scandal went. They'd printed nothing about Malfoy and Hermione being engaged. Hell, they'd have to be married by now, whatever that meant. He bloody hated it, though it was none of his business anymore. But after days and days of valiantly high spirits, he was going to take one more night to wallow in it before he threw the Compact into the sea.

"Need some help fixing your makeup, Weasley?"

Someone was speaking to him, a familiar voice without an Australian accent. He looked around. "Huh?"

"I say, that's a pretty golden compact you've got there. Too good for just powdering your nose, yeah? What's the inscription? R & H - very sweet."

He dropped the compact on the bar, rubbing his eyes. "Lavender? Lavender Brown?"

A woman was standing on the other side of the counter, her skin tanned, her hair tied up high on the top of her head, smirking at him with Lavender Brown's once wide-eyed, guileless face. There was still a doll-like prettiness to her, even though her neck now marked with a savage scar. She was grinning at him with a look in her eyes he'd never seen before, drawling his name. "Ronald Weasley."

So this was what her father had meant when he wrote that scathing article he sold to the Quibbler after the war, denouncing the elitism and corruption of the British wizarding world, retelling the story of nearly losing his daughter to it at the Battle of Hogwarts. He had meant he was bringing them here.

She slid a clean glass from the rack above the bar, began to polish it with a cloth. "My condolences to you on your engagement," she said. "Yes, we still take the Daily Prophet here, page four and everything."

Ron swallowed past a lump in his throat. "Thanks. I knew it was over before the newspaper did but - yeah, thanks."

She did not say anything about the possibility of it being some kind of cosmic justice, though he felt it when he looked at her. Instead, she frowned at a spot over his head. "Weasley, are you making it snow in here?"

He jumped. "Sorry. No really, Lavender, sorry about - about everything - "

"What, that kid stuff, from back in school? No one's sorry about that anymore. There's no need."

He wanted to say something smooth - something she deserved. But she didn't seem to need it, or even to care. He tried anyway. "It's great to see you looking so well. No lasting war wounds, yeah? I'd always wondered."

She rubbed her neck but didn't answer, just motioned toward George with her chin. "Tell your brother if he's going to turn my pub into a subsidiary of his shop, he's going to have to pay me a percentage."

"Oh right. Right. Sure. Sorry. I'll shut him down."

"Just funning, Weasley. This one time, it's okay. Which one is that, anyway?"

"Which one is that?" he echoed.

"Yes, which of your twin brothers is that, Fred or George? I could never tell."

Even through his sun-ruddy complexion, she could see all the blood had drained out of his face.

She narrowed her eyes. "Weasley? Weasley, mate, you alright?"

He nodded, swallowing hard. "Course you wouldn't have heard. You were hurt almost to death yourself. That's George over there. Fred died at Hogwarts, the same day you were... Anyways, he's gone."

She cursed to herself. "Dammit, Lavender. Sit up, Weasley. And call your brother over. I'm going to buy you both a drink."


	23. Twenty-three

Hermione began to test her reverse memory charm in the dusty, open, abandoned garage below their flat. The spectral-meter sat on a workbench, under an overturned crate. "So you do know concealment charms," she said as Malfoy cast one over the device to be sure the Wilkins didn't stumble upon it.

Experimenting with coloured light, she would work to turn green, blue, and red beams to white while Malfoy recorded the data generated by the spectral-meter, crunching calculations, showing her what she needed to know to fine tune her execution. After a week of practice, she could restore any colour of light to full spectrum white in no more than five seconds from beginning to cast the spell. It was quick enough, precise enough to work on human subjects. On her very last try, the complete colour change was made with little more than a flourish of her wand.

As the light changed, Malfoy cheered, threw down his quill, lifted Hermione off the ground, kissed her hard on her cheek. "Yes, you've got it. That was three trials and you get it every time."

She kept her eyes fixed on the bright white light shining from the end of the spectral-meter illuminating a large spot on the wall, blazing as if to burn a hole in the wooden slats of the garage.

"Look at it. It couldn't be more perfect," Malfoy went on.

She turned away from the light, looking at his profile instead. "Perfect," she said, though he wasn't perfect at all. He was scarred and strange and she couldn't be without him anymore. From that moment, she knew it. Her need for him had little to do with panic or trauma and everything to do with just him. What did it mean to feel all those things for someone? She knew that too. The word for it was a small and skittish one, and the first time she wanted to say it to him, he had looked back at her with fear. But she heard it in her heart all the same.

And this was why it hurt to hear him say, "It's finally sorted. Now get your nerve up, fix your parents, and it will all be over."

He released her, moving toward the spectral-meter to power it down.

Her wand hand dropped to her side. "Over. Yes, I suppose it will have to be."

They walked up the stairs, Malfoy charging through scenarios of when and how to best use the spell now that it had proved sound. When she first cast it, before the war, both of her parents had been together, their backs to her, eating dinner in front of the television. But they couldn't sneak into the Wilkins's house, uninvited, and ambush them now. Canadian criminal law would call that a home invasion. If it was Malfoy himself, he would have tried, but there was no way Hermione's nerve would bear that kind of strain.

"So we need to act the next time they come into our flat," Malfoy said. He scanned the room. "Curtains, they've been saying they'll hang curtains for us and they haven't yet. You can mention it on the drive to the clinic tomorrow. Then they'll have to come 'round."

"Me? Yes, well, I guess I can."

His posture slumped, crestfallen. "What's wrong now?"

"Nothing." She turned to the bare window.

"Right, nothing. You're brilliant. So am I, for that matter. We did this together, made it perfect. It's ready. You just need to stay confident - "

"Will you stop it, Malfoy?" She was facing him again.

"What?"

"You are winding me up."

He sat down hard on the sofa, scrubbing his face with his hands. "I'm only cheering you on. Hurrah for Hermione. Hurrah for the Granger family. Hurrah for all of us getting back to our homes and our proper, magical lives."

She was tracing the window pane, as if to measure it with her wand when she was actually moving to hide her face from him, her chin quivering. He wanted to go. She was still mad enough to have fallen in love him but he wanted to leave. Ever since the night in the woods, she had wondered if he might change his mind about going back to Britain, stay at least a little longer, perhaps not as her Muggle-legal husband but at least as the Gralfoy Affair. Sometimes when he looked at her, when he touched her, she was almost sure he had warmed to the idea of the two of them staying together. But now here he was, talking gleefully about the end, the long-awaited reversal coming not just for the Wilkins but for himself as well.

She forced a cough. "Curtains," she said into the cold pane of glass looking out toward her parents' house. "Right. Tomorrow we'll prepare ourselves for curtains."

The Wilkins told Hermione to expect her new curtains that Saturday. She spent the days until then trying not to ruin their last days together being angry with Malfoy for looking forward to the end of them.

"What's with all the photos you're taking?" he asked her. "Planning on making some money, selling Gralfoy Affair shots to the Daily Prophet?"

She batted his arm as best she could while grappling with the heavy wizards' camera fished out of the bottom of her bag. "Shut up, Malfoy. I just like the way you look."

"Well then use the Muggle-wand. Its pictures don't move around but they're prettier anyway, quieter. And come here," he said, pulling her close enough for her to appear in the screen next to him. "They aren't proper Gralfoy Affair photos if there's just me in them. But you have to smile. No, what is that? Alright then don't smile but don't - just try to look like you're not in pain. Honestly, Granger. Look, now we both look like we're suffering."

"Well, maybe I am."

"But why? What have I - "

Monika's firm rap was sounded at the door. The flat was full of the noise of her and Wendell, greeting their tenants, bossing each other over a tape measure, drilling holes into plaster.

"Wait," Malfoy told Hermione through the side of his mouth. "Wait until just after they hang the curtains, or we'll never get any."

When the Wilkins were nearly finished, still standing against the window with their backs to the room, Malfoy gestured at her to draw her wand. She took a deep breath and held it at the ready. With three fingers, Malfoy silently counted down to the moment she would cast the spell.

Three, two, one...

There was a flash of white light. It went through Wendell but missed Monika completely, reflected, slower than the speed of non-magical light, off the glass window pane, sending Malfoy and Hermione sprawling on their stomachs to not be caught in its return. Wendell had fallen to the floor, leaving Monika the only one of them standing.

"What in heaven's name?" she said, stooping to raise Wendell. He was slow to sit up, still loose-spined and woozy as Hermione and Malfoy arrived beside him. "Must have been some kind of electrical short in the wiring. Maybe we hit it with the drill. What do you reckon, Wendell?"

His head rolled on his shoulders, working to focus on his wife's face. "Annie!" he called, as if seeing for the first time in ages. "The wife, Ann Granger. Partner in smiles. Dr. Tim Granger and lovely Hermione Jean."

Monika drew back. "Wendell, what are you on about?"

"Annie! Tim Granger, DDS and the clever Hermione Jean. The brightest witch. Boo!"

She tipped his head back, looking into his pupils. "Wendell, what's wrong? What's happened?"

"Granger Dental Surgery, at your service in Heathgate. Dr. Tim here, Ann the wife, yes, lovely."

"He's injured," Hermione said.

"I don't understand," Malfoy said.

"Is it a stroke? Wendell, look at me. Are you having a stroke?"

His head rolled again. He was laughing, singing the name "Tim, Timothy, Tim, Timothy, Tim, Tim, Ti-ree."

Monika was jabbing at her Muggle-wand. "I'm calling for help. Oh, no. It'll be faster if we take him ourselves. Draco, get him into the car. I think he can walk with some help. I'll run into the house to fetch a few of his things. They always want to see that bloody health card."

She was gone and they were boosting Tim Granger, Hermione's father, between them.

"I don't understand," Malfoy said again. "You'd been executing the spell for days without any problems. Did something happen? You missed Monika altogether and whatever hit Wendell - Tim - seems to only have been half-formed."

She shushed him. "He can hear you. We need to calm him down. The hospital is just going to make things worse, especially if he's awake and rambling like this."

"Fine, but no more spells. There's a sleeping draught in the bag. It should keep him quiet for the night until we can sort this out." Malfoy was standing up to fetch the potion but stopped to take her hand. "Hermione, I'm sorry. I honestly thought we had it."

She wanted to cry, holding her spell-addled father as he raved, lost somewhere between his two identities. All the while she knew exactly why the spell had failed, and what had to happen next.

Tim Granger drank the draught and slept all the way to the hospital in downtown Halifax. At the emergency room doors, they managed to roll him into a wheelchair and up to the triage desk. It was nearly midnight by the time he was in a bed, waiting for the results of a CT scan of his brain. Monika thanked them both for coming and, firm as ever, sent them away. She would stay, struggling to sleep in a high-backed vinyl chair, her head slumped on its wooden arm.

Hermione let herself cry in the lift to the lobby. "Why isn't everyone here crying all the time?" she asked as Malfoy bent to look into her teary face. "And why won't she let me stay with her?"

He closed his arms around her as the floors ticked by. "She's iron-Monika - Ann, I mean. She copes by making sure she's in control of a situation. I know you get it. I thought you invented that."

The lift doors opened and they walked outside. Instead of vanishing to Upper Raleigh, she tugged at his hand, leading him across the street from the hospital block to a small, dark public garden. They sat on the stone steps at the base of a monument to a Scottish colonizer, and she told him what had gone wrong.

"You were counting down for me to start the spell, and when you got to one, you reached out and touched my shoulder. And," she paused, fighting to swallow past the lump in her throat. "And I felt torn in two. I stopped short, balked at the crucial moment, loosed just part of the spell, all of it veering off to one side, to just Dad."

Malfoy was shaking his head. "Why? I still don't see why it happened."

"Draco," she said. "Please listen."

"I'm listening."

Her tears were flowing now, and she hurried to finish while she could still speak intelligibly. "From the start of all this, it's been understood that once my parents are healed, we're all going to go back to our lives. You said so yourself. Once I get the spell right, we go back over the Atlantic, and you disappear to your haunted manor and I - I lose you. Something inside me can't accept that and won't let that happen. It fights me."

He bowed over his lap. "Hermione -"

"Listen," she went on. "I'm not doing it deliberately. I didn't know until this afternoon that the pull in your direction was that strong. I thought I had the strength of will to do it properly. But I didn't."

He grabbed both of her hands. "Stop, Hermione. Why do think I would leave you?"

She sniffed. "Because - because that was always the arrangement."

He swore. "You daft thing, our arrangement is whatever we want it to be. If you want me, if you'll have me, I'll stay."

She bent forward and kissed his hands as they held hers. But she wouldn't look at him.

"Even when I say it, you don't trust me to stay," he said, his hands moving up her arms, holding her upright so she'd look at his face. "Believe me."

"It's not you, it's everything," she said. "When we go back, we destabilize everything we have here. We face your parents, your twisted house, the press, our real careers, my entire social world which consists of little more than Harry and all of the Weasleys, and I don't know how that will change us. Neither do you. But here, so far away, with just Wendell and Monika and you - I'm happy already. And as shocked at myself as I am for failing to force myself to jeopardize it - here we are."

He sighed. "Without the resolve to take the risk, you can't complete the spell successfully."

"Obviously," she sniffed.

"And there's no turning back now, not with poor Tim Granger in that state. In the morning, the doctors are going to look at that brain scan, see there's no stroke, and then what? What if their ministry of magic sends a magical maladies consultant, and they see what we did?" He shuddered. "Hermione, they might prevent you from tampering with him again, and Tim will be left raving."

He stood up, pacing in front of the statue. "No, it has to be done," he said.

She stood up, taking his hands again. "Yes, I know."

With their hands still linked, he raised his fist to his forehead, thinking hard. "There's just one thing to do to eliminate all of your doubt, all of your drive to stay here in Canada."

She knew it too. "Yes. You have to leave me first. You have to go back to Britain so there will be nothing for me to be torn between. We need to pack your bag, and send you on the first ship east."

He pulled her to him fiercely, crushing her. "If you can't make the spell work, you'll have to stay here with them. You'll have to nurse your father for the rest of his life, a one woman St. Mungo's."

She sobbed into his shoulder. "Yes."

"And if it does work, if you fix them both," he swayed on his feet, his face in her hair, hardly able to speak as he told her, "Come back to me."

\---------------------------------

Since arriving in Nova Scotia they had taken no pains to connect with the local wizarding community, but something vaguely familiar glinted in Hermione's peripheral vision as they were just about to disapparate from the Halifax hospital block. There was a newspaper box on the curb, not made of painted sheet metal, like the rest, but woven out of wicker. It might carry the Daily Prophet, something that would give them a better sense of what Malfoy would be sailing back to in the British wizarding world in the morning.

She pulled on the box's handle and a seller's stand sprung into sight on the sidewalk in the box's place. It was manned by a wizard in a huge blue and orange sweater like the Canadian teams wore to play their dangerous kind of ice quidditch. He wasn't selling newspapers but brooms - proper brooms for flying - the first she had seen since coming here.

"Good night for flyin,'" the man greeted her. "Visiting at the hospital, eh?"

She nodded. "Yes, my dad's not well."

He shook his head. "What a sin. That's why I set up here. Folks find if they rent one a these for the trip home, it clears their heads right up. No word of a lie."

She squeezed Malfoy's hand.

"Right sorry I can't do a thing about your dad," the man went on. "But hurtling through the dark on one of these here, you might forget your troubles for a bit. No need to return it, eh. They head right back to me once they're done."

Malfoy stepped forward and paid the fee for a single broom large enough for both of them. "You want to drive it?" he asked her as the stand folded itself back into a wicker newspaper box.

She shook her head. "Oh, no. I'm exhausted from crying. And you're better at this than me, anyway," she said as she took the fore position. "No fancy quidditch moves," she warned as he settled behind her.

His arms closed around and in front of her. Over her shoulder, he brushed a gentle kiss against her cheek. "Not this time."

They kicked off, into the dark sky. The city spread out below them, streetlights and signs curving along the edge of a large, deep harbour spanned by two towering suspension bridges. The lights of ships and boats bobbed on the water, and on a steep hill in the centre of downtown was an old fortress left over from wars with the French, its flags still lit with bright yellow lamps. In only a few areas were there no lights at all, in the cemeteries, some of the oldest known graveyards on this continent.

Typically, she had no taste for flying, and she hadn't flown like this, in open air, in years. The nighttime late summer air was cold, almost sharp, and it chilled her in spite of Malfoy's arms around her. As they lost sight of the lights of the city, they flew over dark forests. To the east was the sea, and as they flew closer to it, near Upper Raleigh, the sharpness of the cold air took on a more substantial form. It was rain, hard rain, crystalline and icy, moving sideways toward them. Malfoy flew hard into it, racing to get home. She lost her breath, closed her eyes and ducked her head into his shoulder.

"Landing," he said, and she found the earth with her feet again. The wicker wizard's broom whizzed away as soon as Malfoy let go of it, and they were left standing in the dark yard outside the Wilkins's deserted house.

She hadn't let go of him when he helped her off the broom.

"Your hands are freezing," he said.

She jerked them away from him. "Yeah, sorry. I won't touch you."

"Don't be stupid," he said, taking her hand and tugging her out of the rain, through the door of the garage.

She followed without a word, the broom ride having cleared her mind, just like the vendor had promised.

Inside the flat, she stood blinking in the light, as if stunned, making no move to take off her drenched jacket. Malfoy sighed, slightly exasperated, and slid each of his hands inside her jacket, over her shoulders, pushing it off both sides at once, dragging her sleeves down the lengths of her arms, dropping the sopping mess of it on the floor. The rain had penetrated her clothing, all the way to her skin, but from the moment his hands moved inside her jacket, she felt a heat growing inside her. Her pulse pounded as he draped a towel over her clinging wet shirt. She held it against herself, shivering but hot as she stood motionless in front of him, her lips parted and trembling.

With a second towel, he began to squeeze the water out of her hair. He was close, filling her visual field. The rain intensified the smell of his skin but no matter how deeply she inhaled she couldn't get enough. She swayed toward him, soaked with rain himself, his hair looking darker than usual. A drop formed on the ends of his hair, falling to drip more cold water onto his already wet shirt. Her stiff fingers rose to work at the buttons holding the cold, wet fabric against his chest, unfastening them.

His fingers closed over hers. "Don't worry about me right now. I'll dry off in a moment. We need to see to you first."

She didn't seem to be listening, combing her fingers through his hair, shaking the water out of it. "You're drenched -- "

"Hermione, leave it," he said. "You need to be in peak health to fix the spell. We can't let you catch a chill. And look at your cheeks already. You're flushed. You'd better not be getting - "

He couldn't finish. He had held a cold palm to her hot cheek, as if checking her temperature, and she'd sprung forward, mouth open, kissing him deeply, the warmth of the inside of her a shocking contrast to the coldness of his face. She was pulling him down, in, stepping between his feet, her palms pressed to his neck. He had never failed to respond to her like this and he leaned into her now, his hand tightening around hers, over the buttons of his shirt, holding them in place, still questioning.

She broke away to speak. "If you have to leave me," she said, "leave me with everything."

The towels slipped to the floor, falling in a heap on their feet. She couldn't look him in the face, standing close, her shoulders heaving in her soaked shirt, hardly speaking above a whisper as she said, "For at least one more night, you're mine, my husband. And before you go, I claim all of you, the rest of you."

No more questions. He didn't stop to ask whether it was too late, whether she was ready, if she truly trusted him, or if she was just using him as a medicine for forgetting the disaster around them. He was less than a saint, less than a gentle, restrained fake husband. He was still himself, still Draco Malfoy, greedy and indulgent, releasing her fingers to let them undress him, releasing months of his own frustration as he took her by the waist, his hands delving inside the hem of her wet shirt, fingers splayed on the cold but burning bare skin at the small of her back as she arched into him.

He was stripped to the waist, her shoulder bared through the over-stretched neck of her shirt, his mouth on her collar bone, devouring. Her hands traced the V shape of the back of his torso, her leg raised, one heel hooked into the back of his knee, his hand gripping her thigh, pulling her against himself with a vigor that made her gasp for the breath to say, "Malfoy, curtains."

Without words or wands a wind gusted from where they stood entwined to the window at the far east end of the attic, roaring over the papers on the table, rattling the teacups on the counter, lifting the curtains like wings as it flung them shut.

\--------------------------------------

The morning had barely started to lighten, dim sunlight visible only through the crack between the curtains, when Draco began to understand that he was awake. She was here too, not lying beside him to be studied but pressed against him almost too close to be seen. He held his eyes shut and flexed his arms. They were still full of her, warm and soft, stirring slightly at his movement. Eyes still closed, he bowed his face into her hair and breathed her scent. There was something faintly different to it this morning. It was him, traces of himself left on her body, at least for now. His first morning waking up with his wife in his arms, and maybe his last. He gathered her closer, kissed the crown of her head, tucked her hair aside, kissed her ear, her eyelids, indulging in the quiet happiness of silently loving her from this close, ignoring as best he could what was to come.

She moved her cheek against him, her closed mouth pressed against his chest, her mind fighting not to wake up. As long as the night went on, and the ships stayed in moored in the harbour, they could stay like this. Snuggling a sleeping partner at night was something she had only ever done for comfort when restless. Once she fell asleep properly, she always drifted to her own private space on the bed, waking up rested and untouched. But last night, she hadn't been able to detach herself from him, even if it meant staying awake most of the night as he slept in her arms. Eventually, she had fallen to sleep herself and he had held her, as he did now, as her sleep ebbed away. He called her back, his hand tracing the contour of her side in a smooth, unbroken line.

Her body answered back, shivering beneath his touch. Sensing she was awake, he bent lower, brushing his lips against hers as he said, "I have to leave."

She groaned into his shoulder, nodding even as she folded herself around him. Again...

When at last his arms where unclasping from around her, pulling away, she opened her eyes to see him sitting on the side of the bed, his back white in the near-dark of the early morning attic. Listless, she hugged the still-warm blankets around herself and watched him as he moved about the flat. She didn't ask him if he wanted something to eat before going. Of course he wouldn't.


	24. Twenty-four

Monika Wilkins had already seen Hermione's shoes approaching the outer edge of the long yellow hospital drapes drawn around Tim Granger's bed.

"Hello?"

"Yes, come in, Hermione." Monika looked terrible - ruddy but gaunt, her jacket draped across her chest like a much too small blanket, her Muggle-wand charging through an electrical cord attached to the wall above her husband's head. She did not smile, did not look at Hermione as she came to stand beside the bed where Tim Granger slept.

Her answers to Hermione's questions about how Tim was feeling were curt, distracted. The doctors were pleased he was resting and had found nothing abnormal in his scans. The quiet was painful, making it hard for Hermione to think of an excuse to get Monika to leave, so she could be alone with her father to try the spell properly, unconflicted by other things.

"We need to talk," Monika began. "We need to talk about your mother. Sit down, Hermione."

She obeyed.

"The names Wendell kept repeating last night, Dr. Tim Granger, DDS, Ann, Heathgate - I had all night to look them up." She swiped at the screen of her phone, untethered it from the wall, and pointed it at Hermione. It was open to the business website for their first clinic, Granger Dental Surgery, in a London burrough, last updated before the war. "Try the 'about us' link."

Hermione touched the words and a picture appeared of Wendell and Monika, only it was labelled Tim and Ann Granger. There was even a note in the caption about their daughter.

"There's more," Monika went on, taking her phone back to flip through more results. "Pages and pages more about this couple who looks like Wendell and me, does what we do, likes what we like, goes where we go, right up until any mention of them ceases over four years ago, when Wendell and I opened the clinic in Upper Raleigh."

Hermione listened, speechless, her pulse in her throat. This was her own mother, her model - how could she not have expected this?

"These Grangers are our perfect doppelgangers in every way but one: the daughter." She spoke the word, and waited. "I don't have any children, Hermione. I have to insist on it every time I go to the gynecologist, but it's true. Wendell has his theories about repressed teenaged trauma but the evidence for that kind of thing has never read as convincing for me. And then I looked deeper into Ann Granger. Such a plain name, you'd expect she'd want to give her daughter something more interesting, she and her husband Tim."

Hermione shifted miserably in her chair. Something imperious and familiar in her mother's tone kept her quiet, as if by habit.

"Here, see this photo from someone's online wedding album? That's Ann Granger and her daughter Hermione." When Hermione had seen the photo of herself and her mother at cousin Janice's wedding reception, Monika sat back, pulled her arms behind her jacket-blanket and said simply. "Explain."

What to confess first: Hermione's true identity, her parents' false identities, or the fact that magic is real? What followed truly was like a legal proceeding. Hermione talking and talking, Monika breaking in to question and clarify, all the while withholding her ruling with the cold, grave restraint of a professional judge. She listened to the story of Hermione's Hogwarts letter arriving when she was eleven, to as detailed a sketch as she ever knew about the wizarding war, to Hermione's justification for charming them, and for the reasons why she had come to find them. Through it all, Monika held herself concerned but aloof.

When Hermione had finished, Monika folded her jacket, sat up straight in her chair and said, "All of that is completely ludicrous."

"Let me show you then," Hermione said, pulling her wand from her jacket.

Monika laughed at the sight of it. "Really? A magic wand? What's next, Draco flying by the window on a broomstick?"

"Mum, please - "

"Watch your mouth."

"Please. Please let me try to fix Da - Tim, Wendell, I mean. My spell went wrong yesterday. It was completely my fault and I'm so sorry. It's what's made him like this. Let me try again. I've never been more motivated for this to work." She stood up beside his bed.

"Sit down."

She clenched her fist around her wand. "If you don't believe in magic, then there's no harm in me trying. The worst it can be is embarrassing. Your opposition only makes sense if you do believe in it. Do you believe?"

Monika's hands closed over her abdomen, the unseen flesh marked with the signs of a childbirth her mind told her had never happened. Her hands closed into fists themselves. "No, of course I don't believe," she said. "But do your nonsense and we can be done talking about it. Then you can tell me what's really going on with these Granger people of yours."

Hermione took a deep breath, shook her hair out of her face, raised her wand, and for good measure, spoke the name of the spell out loud over Tim Granger's sleeping body.

"Memento."

Light flashed from her wand, engulfing her father in bright white magic. It struck him squarely as he slept, working through all of him.

Monika raised a hand to shield her eyes. When the flare was over, Tim slept on. She snorted. "Right."

Hermione dared to step closer, bending toward his face, shaking his shoulder. She spoke to him in a small, sweet voice. "Dad? Daddy, it's me."

Tim Granger's eyes clenched tightly closed. He stirred, raising his hand to touch his forehead, puzzled at the tubing and catheter fastened to it. His voice croaked in his throat before he was able to say, "Erm. Hermione, what's happened?"

She uttered a little cry. "So much, Dad."

"Where's your mother?"

"She's here. She's been here all night long."

Tim's hand brushed Hermione's cheek. "Why the tears? Is it that bad?"

"No, it's wonderful." Hermione bowed over her father's chest, weeping into his shoulder. "I missed you, Daddy."

He patted her back, looking past her head, baffled at his wife. "What's all this then, Ann?"

She startled in her chair but answered to the name. "Nothing at all, dear. Hermione, go back and wait for me at home, if you please."

"Oh, she's alright," Tim was saying, still patting his daughter's back. "Let her have her cry. No need for - "

Monika stood up, her hand on Tim's pulling it away from Hermione. "Out, Hermione. Go home and pull yourself together."

Hermione waited in Upper Raleigh, alone, for the rest of the day. For the first time that week, the town saw a day without rain, but the Wilkins's property was a bleak setting anyway. When she was forced to reverse the spell on her father before her mother, she had created a rift between them - one Monika would not let her help them navigate. It was possible that Monika would never accept what had happened, that she'd never allow Hermione to use magic on her, that she'd choose the identity she knew over the one she didn't remember.

Hermione stepped inside the flat, slipping out of her shoes, muddy from the yard. Her wet clothing from the night before was still heaped on the floor, where Draco had dropped it away from her body. Maybe she'd leave it there, until it either dried out or came to life with mildews and moulds or whatever else was waiting in the air of this old building for a soggy host.

The flat was awful without him, the unmade bed worst of all. She knew she should lay down on the sofa, go to sleep, waiting for her mother to find her, for however long it took - weeks, maybe years. She didn't. Her heart was hurting so much already, what would a little more matter? She let herself fall face down on the bed, burrowing into the sheets, crying against the pillow that, for now, still smelled like him.

\-------------------------------------

Elsewhere…

Lavender Brown and George Weasley were getting along like a house on fire. They spent hours at a table outside the Brown Besom, under a large yellow umbrella, their heads bent over pads of paper, scratching out figures, reading columns of numbers, making plans to bring a Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes shop to Sydney.

"It doesn't have to be for wizards only," Lavender said. "Not like my father, who says all the right things but then goes and opens an exclusive club like this one here."

George was beaming. "Too right. Our shop could be a front room for Muggle magic tricks and toys, light potions, maybe a few treats with more of a kick for our very best Muggle customers. They don't have to understand it to enjoy it."

Ron knew he should be smiling at them. It ought to be nice that they'd found their entrepreneurial soulmates in one another.

"Just my luck," was what he thought to himself instead.

Recovered war hero Lavender Brown was stunning - still bold as ever but now tough and sure of everything. She still laughed but not just to fill silences anymore. She still took care of people but without turning around to be petted and praised for it. And even though it was hard for him to imagine the person he knew her to be now ever calling him "Won-won," the rest of what he remembered about dating her wasn't difficult to imagine at all.

He had passed behind her, during a busy time at the pub when crowds of people were jostling one another with drinks and music, and he'd raised his hand to her back to let her know not to move backward to trip over him. At the touch - the contour and heat of her back through her sundress - he was sixteen again, stupid with the same old hormones and a fresh new admiration. Neither of those things could change the fact that he was too old to have a crush on Lavender Brown, and much too late.

The best he could do now was be happy for George.

"What d'you reckon, Ronnie?" George said, raising his head and grinning across the table. "Savvy Sydney businesswoman, Lavender Brown, has crunched the numbers and thinks the shop will be a winner here. How about you?"

"Huh? Yeah, I keep telling you. It's great."

"Incisive analysis, Weasley," Lavender said, swatting his arm with a notepad. "You might be a little more excited about getting to stay here in paradise to run it."

"What - me?"

George snorted. "Who else? Don't think you'll be getting your hands on the flagship store on Diagon Alley. That's the nerve center. That's for me. And anyways, Mum would kill me if I didn't come home. You, on the other hand..."

And so Ron took George's place at the table, under the umbrella with Lavender, planning in earnest to bring the Australian version of the shop to life. She took him 'round the neighbourhood scouting locations, ran him through studios as he moaned through the designing of the shop's decoration. She put on high heels, took his arm and introduced him at cocktail parties for the local wizard commercial barons.

They were walking on the beach after one such party, still over-dressed, carrying their shoes hooked over their fingers when she summoned the Brown Besom's copy of yesterday's Daily Prophet.

She pressed it to his chest, over the ends of his undone tie. "Read it."

Ron cringed at the sight of it.

"Go on," she pushed, smacking the newspaper against his chest again. "You know where to find it. Page four."

Ron blew out a breath, dropped his shoes into the sand, and opened the newspaper. He spotted the photo first. It was Draco Malfoy, on the deck of a trans-Atlantic ship, alone. Dressed all in black, Malfoy leaned against the ship's railing, looking out at a cold, grey sea nothing like the pink and yellow evening surf stretching out in front of Ron. The caption below Malfoy's photo announced, with overwrought sympathy verging on sarcasm, the end of the Gralfoy Affair. Malfoy, it reported accurately, was on his way back to Britain without Hermione. It was there in writing, and in the expression on his face. All those occulmency lessons and no one ever thought to tell the git to try hiding his feelings by smiling every once in awhile.

"So that's that," Lavender said. "I didn't think your mother would tell you about it. But I thought you should know." She looked at her toenails, painted glossy blue, half buried in the sand. "If you still feel for her, Ron, you should go to her now. Shouldn't be too hard to find her in Canada. You should go."

He scanned Amund Rentz's article again. The better part of it was probably rubbish, but Malfoy certainly looked glum in the photo. Ron looked out at the sea himself, the Pacific Ocean, the biggest thing there is in this world. It might not be impossible to cross. But what was that to him?

He folded the newspaper, tossed it into the air above their heads, and flicked it into embers with his wand. "Nah," he said. "Here's where I belong now." He turned toward Lavender, his head bowed, waiting.

She exaggerated a sigh, laughing softly. "Good to hear. But honestly, Weasley, once again, you're going to just stand there and leave everything to me?"

He grinned foolishly at their feet. "Well, you're just so good at it."

She dropped her shoes, threw her brown, bare arms around his neck, and snogged him clear back to school.


	25. Twenty-five

There were no flowers on the ship W-HMS Hightail, conjured or otherwise - no cloying scent of narcissus, no cyclonic winds but what was typical of open seas. Yet throughout his voyage east, Draco Malfoy was struck with a sense of his mother. The crossing was not long but it left him ample time to contemplate life back in Britain as a free wizard for the first time since the trials. He didn't feel free, caught waiting for the success of something that might never happen, left with nowhere to go but an empty, haunted manor.

Even from her prison, his mother would be there with him, in the walls and windows, unable to speak but pressing on him from every side all the same. From the moment he came out of Innocentia, she had been demanding a reckoning, an accounting for what the pushing and chasing meant. There was no way to speak to her but to go to her in jail, brushing against the hard incarceration he had narrowly missed himself.

Prison for British wizards was no longer the deathly nightmare it was in his miserable sixth year at school, when his father had been in Azkaban. Neither Narcissa nor Lucius Malfoy was housed there, nor guarded by Dementors. The new reforms had followed the Muggle model, and now prisoners were kept more-or-less humanely but apart from their loved ones. Narcissa was serving her term in the Cross Crispin Correctional Institute for Witches. His father - well, who cares?

That's what Malfoy was thinking as the flare of a camera flashed behind him on the deck of the Hightail. He swore at himself as he pulled his hood over his face and jammed his hands into his pockets. The Gralfoy Affair was not yet as boring for wizarding society as he hoped it would be. He should have taken something of Hermione's with him, something small and personal he could hold in his hand, press to his face to remember her by. That's what people were supposed to do to get themselves through painful, prolonged, possibly permanent separations like this, wasn't it? Hell, he'd left Hermione an entire spectral-meter to remember him by. Maybe that wasn't quite right either.

He'd never done this before. But there was the book in his bag, The Winter's Tale. The plot wasn't much like their story but it had a husband separated from his wife, who gets her back in spite of being the biggest prat ever. That would have to be his love token - a book she had once read, with a character who shared her name.

He left his hood raised as they landed on a pier on the Thames. He was still standing by himself after most of the crowd had disapparated, a travel option not available for people visiting Cross Crispin. A visit there required an Auror escort, something he hadn't had since the day he was taken to St. Mungo's himself. He'd need to make his way to the ministry to find one. He sneered to himself. Maybe they'd assign him Potter. He was still junior enough for milk runs like that, but probably far too showy. The ministry would be shut down for the day by now anyway. After five o'clock in London is a terrible time to try to do business. He laid a hand on his famished stomach and looked about for an inn.

\-----------------------------

Monika stayed away.

Hermione slept, cleaned, did the laundry, ate a little. Alone in the flat, she felt marooned, jailed. She tried to be happy about her progress. Malfoy was gone but her task was half completed. Her father was back, though left on his own to persuade Monika and the medical Muggles that he wasn't mad. If only Monika would submit to the reality of the spells and magic she had seen for herself, they could all go back to Britain. Until then, there was only waiting.

It was late at night, inky dark when a light appeared in a window of the Wilkins's house. Without an invitation, Hermione apparated to their back porch with an exaggerated crack loud enough for Monika to hear from indoors.

Monika opened the door but stood planted on the threshold, barring the way inside. "Look, I'm exhausted, Hermione. And I have to be back at the hospital to pick up - my husband when he's discharged first thing in the morning, right after the doctors do their rounds tomorrow. I'd really rather not."

"Just tell me what - your husband had to say about everything, about my version - "

She was stepping back, slowly closing the door. "As I said, I'd really rather not. Not tonight -"

"Mum, please -"

"Don't you - I said, go. I need time alone, away from - him, Tim, Wendell, whomever, and certainly away from you to sort out the world the two of you have shaken to its foundations today. Go home to your husband and let me be."

Hermione bowed her head. "I can't, Draco's gone."

Monika left off closing the door. "What do you mean, gone?"

"He had to leave for the spell would work. We had to choose between staying here together and healing your memories. Dad was already injured. Of course we chose the two of you."

"Well you needn't have bothered," Monika snapped.

Hermione held her chin high, her eyes meeting her mother's even as they watered and shimmered with tears. She knew her marriage to Malfoy had meant something to Monika. She had felt responsible for it, proud of it. She'd even come to like strange Draco.

Monika closed her eyes, shaking her head. Now what had they done? Her voice was quieter, calm as she said. "Come back tomorrow, when we're home from the hospital. We'll talk then."

\-------------------------------

The young Auror was making a show of being bored as he led Draco Malfoy - yes, that Draco Malfoy - into the Ministry's high security Floo division. The Auror been raised right, on loathing and fear of Death Eaters, and he had his own non-ministry-approved ideas about where they could stick all that talk about 'reconciliation.' Now here he was practically holding hands with the Death Eaters' little prince who had skipped jail on some fuzzy claim to being underage when he took that mark on his arm. Was the filthy thing still burned into his flesh, under all that black clothing? He wouldn't give Malfoy the satisfaction of glaring at him as they sized each other up at the fireplace grate.

There was a puff of powder. "Cross Crispin Correctional."

They were in grey wooden shack on a moor, like something from a Bronte novel. Which one had Hermione read? She'd never said. Malfoy shook his head, soot falling from his hair, clearing the rest away with his wand, cleaning up to see his mother. The Auror was openly sneering at him now.

"What?"

"Nothing. It's this way."

Cross Crispin looked like a post-World War II Muggle middle school penned behind a high chain-link fence in spite of being unplottable. It was grey breeze-block and yellow brick arranged in a stack jutting out of the heather. The Auror waved a wand over checkpoints without a word, opening gates, closing doors.

"I've got Malfoy to see Malfoy," he told the uniformed witch at the end of a long corridor.

There was a clunk and a grind, a flash of red light, and the final door opened. Malfoy didn't move.

"Half and hour," was what the Auror said, shoving his shoulder from behind, sending him through the doorway.

Inside the small room was a single metal table, and at it, springing to her feet at the sight of him, was his mother. For the first time in his life, she looked tiny and plain in striped prison garments instead of brocades and hats, her grey eyes glistening as she held out her arms. "Draco, my darling boy!"

"Mother." He spoke her name, hung his head, approached slowly, almost sideways while she beckoned to him across the table. He wanted to fall on her lap, weep against her belly, arms around her waist. He wanted her to smooth his hair and caress his cheeks and tell him to get some rest. She was here and alive and his but he had to resist. He was a man now, a husband, and he fought for composure.

She bounced on the spot, her usual smooth demeanor eaten up with the horror and stress of the past years. "Let me see you, Draco. So grown up, so thin. Come closer, dearest one. Mother can't move from this table."

He stepped into her arms, turned his head to smell the narcissus in her hair. It couldn't be perfume, not here. It was a part of her now, her magic, her person. He felt himself breaking down, and had to step away, gathering both of her hands and holding them in his.

He spoke to her. "Now, Mother, you seem to get around just fine to me, all the way across the Atlantic, if you have a mind to."

She shushed him much too loudly. "Of course I've been right here serving my sentence all this time," she called to the corners of the room, to whoever was listening. H She was pulling him into the chair on the other side of her table. He crashed into the seat. "That was very particular magic, Draco, for a very particular circumstance. You saw how it worked, you clever dear. With my son, something from our house, and the woman of his future, it was my right, my power to reach you as mistress and guardian of the Houses of Malfoy and Black."

He slid his arm out of her grip. "Mother, stop. No more talk of noble houses. You're just the same."

She flung herself backward in her chair. "How can you say that? After all I've done to bring you and the Granger girl to an understanding - how can you?"

"An understanding?" he scoffed. "No more, mother. I'll have no more of your doting, innocent act."

Her mouth fell open, eyes clouding, her voice high and loud as she said, "Act?"

Her feelings had always been a storm he was easily swept into. Their fury seldom mounted. But that was before. Her emotions were rising now, the pressure in the tiny visitation room climbing dangerously high. He fought against them but still had to answer her. "Yes, an act. You've had nothing but disgust for the likes of Hermione Granger right up until the ministry started offering reconciliation. You haven't fooled anyone. She's still inhuman to you, just an object, a tool to fix our family name, your status, and get back what you want for yourself."

She nearly shrieked. "Myself? Nothing, Draco, nothing is ever solely about myself. I risked immediate destruction by the Dark Lord himself for the barest wisp of a possibility that you might still be alive - "

He hung his head. "Yes. Yes, I will always remember. It's beautiful, singular but it doesn't give you license to misuse my wife."

He had meant for the word "wife" to explode like a bomb in their conversation, showing Narcissa that his connection to Hermione wasn't just a Muggle-legal arrangement, not just a convenient pretense to rehabilitate the Malfoy family. Surely after witnessing their awkward marriage ceremony and seeing nothing beyond the night she obliterated the diamond stick pin in the sandstorm, the object from the house than she needed to see and reach them, she would be shocked to discover the new authenticity in his loyalty to Hermione. It was not the relationship of a man to a tool for salvaging social standing.

But there was nothing like surprise in Narcissa as she smiled, lifting one dark eyebrow, sitting up with suddenly cool composure, folding her arms across her chest. "You think I'm surprised to learn you do indeed love her. You think my power to see you ended once the heirloom was destroyed." It could have been legilimency but it was more likely just motherhood. "For a time it did. But now, something new has been taken from the House of Malfoy, an object that wasn't in your wife's possession before."

She smiled at him in eerie quiet.

He was shaking his head. "That's not possible, Mother. Hermione is in Canada and I came here directly from London. I haven't been back to the Manor to take anything from there."

"Oh, not the Manor specifically, but the House of Malfoy." She settled her elbows onto the tabletop, leaning toward her son. "What's in your pocket, darling? With your wand and that electrical Muggle device - there's something else in your pocket."

He drew out the small battered paperback of The Winter's Tale. "This isn't an heirloom from the house, Mother. It's a cheap copy I got at school."

She laughed, softly, with amused affection. "You've read it, I assume. Do you remember? When its Queen Hermione is put away, there's something special about her."

He turned his mind to the play, not to the later parts, where Hermione comes back to her family from the dead, through magic. He thought of the earlier parts, the beginning, when Queen Hermione is sent away to prison even though she is…

Narcissa squealed, clapping her hands as she saw the realization strike him. "Yes, Draco! Your wife is in the same state as Queen Hermione. There is a new heir to the House of Malfoy."

He gripped the table with both hands. "That's not possible. It was just one night, and we used a spell."

She laughed again. "Those spells. If there's any hesitation, the smallest desire for them not to work, they can lose effectiveness. That's why most wizard parents are young. That little madam, on some hidden level of her heart she wanted to keep you badly enough to want your child. And she's saved us all, saved us with the strongest show we could have made to being a reformed family: a mixed-blood heir!"

Draco sat back. "Mother, no. You're wrong. There's no new heir."

She grabbed at his hands across the table. "There has to be, Draco. If there was no new Malfoy, no object from our house, my vision would be closed to anything outside this prison. But I can see, Draco. These past few days, I've been able to see again. She balked at her contraception spell, fell too hard, and now I can see."

Malfoy tugged his hands out of his mother's hold. He stood up, took a giant step toward the locked door, banged against it with his fist.

"Oh, there's no rush," Narcissa called over the gong-like racket of his pounding. "She won't even be able to tell for a few more days." She was standing up, her arms outstretched again. "Congratulations, my darling boy!"

Malfoy fell out of the room as the witch warden opened the door, Narcissa's laughter cut short as it slammed closed behind him. He slumped against the wall, sweating, panting. Even the Auror looked up from his newspaper and to ask, "You alright then, Mr. Malfoy?"

He nodded, "Yes, thank you. We can go."

Like an automaton, he followed the Auror out of Cross Crispin, through the moor, back to the shed with the Floo. As he walked, he remembered it all. One thing about his night with Hermione was certain. It hadn't been her who lacked the resolve to cast an effective contraception spell. He knew it because she hadn't cast one. It had been him.


	26. Twenty-six

From the Ministry of Magic, Draco Malfoy apparated to Fleet Street, to the offices of his family's solicitors. It was an entirely unpleasant meeting. There may have been an audible gasp as he swept through the high mahogany front doors, tall and thin, white-haired, and chillingly lordly as Lucius himself. With Lucius and Narcissa incarcerated, the usual care and obsequies the firm had always lavished on its Malfoy clients had deteriorated to what Draco, railing at a hastily assembled boardroom of senior partners, described as "gross negligence." In fairness, the British wizarding legal community was still getting accustomed to the idea that prison was NOT supposed to drive people mad. This explained some of the lawyers' failure to bring a motion to have Narcissa relocated to St. Mungo's until Draco demanded it. If the court psychiatrists agreed with him about her mental deterioration in prison, Narcissa would be able to await her reconciliation hearings in a forensic hospital instead of a cell.

At Cross Crispin, he had found her a cackling, conniving mess. And then he had inflamed the situation by fighting with her about Hermione. He hadn't even gone to her when she stood up to embrace him as he left. It had been a mistake. No one is ready for it - that first moment when a doting parent becomes someone who needs to be doted on, when the roles of caregiving flip. It is no less shocking for being inevitable. And he couldn't have handled it any worse. Everything he said to her was wrong.

Fighting with the lawyers had been satisfying at the time, but even that was icing over into cold comfort. He'd paid them a huge retainer to start Narcissa's new proceedings, and it made him feel like they had won in the end after all. It didn't matter. Prison was destroying his mother's mind, and once St. Mungo's got involved, she could be treated, made into someone more like herself again. Even if that meant bringing in that awful Dr. Berlant, it would still be better than to leave her sitting in a cell raving about impossible heirs.

It was Narcissa who was wrong about that. She had to be. Of course he'd cast the contraception spell himself. His father knew better than to believe his interdiction against under-aged partying would be sufficient to guard Draco's teenaged purity, and he'd made sure to warn his son to always cast the spell himself to be sure it was done and done with a proper commitment to preventing unapproved heirs. Malfoy hadn't even considered the possibility that Hermione might be the one of the pair of them to do it. It was his responsibility to her, to himself, and to his family, current and future. No, his mother had to be wrong.

Still, here he was, standing on the same pier on the Thames where he'd just disembarked from the Hightail the day before.

He would leave for Canada immediately.

No, there was no need.

Narcissa was mad at the moment. He would stay in London and try to look angelic and trustworthy at her mental fitness hearings, leaning on the lawyers to make sure she was moved to St. Mungo's as quickly as possible.

But what about Hermione? He had to know for sure that she wasn't - wasn't - anyway, it's not the kind of exchange people should have by albatross. His hand closed around the Muggle-wand in his pocket. Why didn't he leave Hermione with one of her own so he could at least talk to her through the bloody thing? Stupid backward -

No, he had to leave today.

But then he'd be in the way of her work with her parents. That was the whole reason he'd gone in the first place.

So he should stay.

But how could he survive any longer without knowing?

No, there was nothing to know. It was a bunch of raving nonsense.

Yet...

"Oi! Malfoy! Draco!"

He jumped, raised his collar over his face, and looked about. A large man in a heavy beard was bearing down the gangway of a newly docked ship, grinning a little foolishly. Malfoy stared back, noting the unusual length of the man's arms. That was how he knew. "Goyle?"

"Malfoy! You've made it back this year."

The long arms had enfolded Malfoy, two large hands pounding on his back. "Er - yeah. I just got into town yesterday."

"Canada, yeah? That's what the papers were saying, yeah?" Goyle was now digging Malfoy's ribs with one elbow, threatening the flash of good humor he'd felt at meeting him. "Me, I'm back from Italy, inspecting our operations abroad." He puffed his chest.

Goyle's mother hadn't sheltered and abetted the Dark Lord in his war crimes with anything like the notoriety of Narcissa Malfoy and she hadn't gone to prison with her husband after the war. Goyle had gone from the Battle of Hogwarts back to his family estate, taking over as figurehead of his family's large, already well-managed owl-feed enterprises. "Back just in the nick of time too. What's the time, Draco? Are we running late yet?"

Malfoy was coming to himself, shaking his head. "Goyle, what're you on about?"

"The memorial," he bawled. "It's Crabbe's birthday, the day his mother celebrates a memorial for him, every year since - you know." He was finally seeing that Malfoy didn't know. "Oh right. You've never made it. You've been - "

"Yes, yes."

"Well, come on. Better late than nothing. Looks like you could use a laugh, any road. Right then."

Malfoy had no time to ask how Vincent Crabbe's annual memorial could be a laugh before Goyle had taken him by the arm and, with a boorish assumption of consent, side-along apparated the both of them to Crabbe Manor. They landed with a thud outside the gates.

"Dammit, Goyle - "

"Sorry, Malfoy. Sorry. Oh look, there's everyone from school. You coming, Malfoy?"

"In a moment." He shook off Goyle's meaty hand and went to greet Madam Crabbe. She was seated by a fountain in the centre of a patio, a life-sized portrait of Vincent Crabbe mounted on a large, ornate easel beside her. Malfoy froze in place remembering - the Room of Requirement, fiendfyre, Crabbe melting into a wave of flame, the heat at his back, smoke in his lungs, terror, and brooms overhead, rescue in Potter, Weasley, and Hermione.

Someone thumped Malfoy on the back. Blaise was grinning at him. "Free Malfoy. Nicely done, nicely done."

He almost smiled. "Just a moment," he said, gesturing to Madam Crabbe.

Malfoy approached her with the calm and kindness he should have shown his own mother. He took her hand and she covered it with both of hers. "Lovely to see you again, Draco. Give my loving regards to your mother."

"Of course." He bowed toward Crabbe's portrait, knew he had to say something. "He was," he began. "He was very brave."

Madam Crabbe dabbed her eyes with a lace handkerchief. "Yes. Thank you."

Goyle and Blaise surrounded him as he stepped away. Others were gathering - Pansy, Millicent, Nott.

Pansy stepped forward to straighten his straight tie. "You look awful, Draco," she said. "Years older."

Fair enough.

They asked him about everything: his parents, where he was staying, what he had or hadn't been eating. No one asked him anything more about what the Daily Prophet had been printing about the Gralfoy Affair. It may have been because they were embarrassed for him. He didn't care. They were doing their best to treat him normally, like a person, only he wasn't sure if he still knew that person.

The sun went down over Madam Crabbe's garden. She took her leave and the guests disapparated, singly or in groups.

Pansy approached him one more time before he left, one of her hands clasped around his wrist, the pad of her thumb stroking his pulse point. "You're off to the inn in London, are you? There's no need for that, you know. You can make your home with us, at my parents' if you're not ready to go back to your own family home. You need to be cared for, and properly."

He twisted his wrist in her grasp. "That's very kind but - "

"Or," she went on, cutting short his refusal, stepping even closer, "if you don't want to bring my whole family into it, you can stay at mine, in the city, discreetly as you please."

He used his free hand to withdraw himself from her hold. "Thank you, Pansy. But no."

Her chin was tipped upward, dark eyes searching his face in the twilight. "I see," she said. "It's true."

He stepped backward. "It's true."

Engaging another Auror and going back to Cross Crispin was out of the question, especially at this time of night. It was, however, the perfect time to visit a haunted house. Malfoy didn't need to cut himself to get the manor to let him inside this time. The iron bars on the gate almost seemed to sigh as they twisted out of his way. Inside the grand front doors, he lit the lights. In the glow, he could see footprints in the dust on the dark floors, his and Hermione's from the morning they had spent here together. It was not so long ago, it was ages ago.

He would sleep in his own bed tonight, but first, he would walk past the dining room, past the door to his father's study, and on to the library, his mother's room. In truth, any natural cleverness he had must have come from her. If his father hadn't been too vain to countenance a working wife, she might have distinguished herself in wizard society for something besides being the Dark Lord's hostess.

Malfoy walked a full circle around a wing-backed green leather chair, her favourite. He recognized it even before dragging back the white dust cover draped over it. There was no scent of narcissus trapped beneath the sheet. He sat in it, pulling his knees to his chest, curled up like a child. Still no scent, no wind, no flying dust.

His hands had clenched into fists, his head bowed into his knees in her chair. "Please," he said between gritted teeth. "Mother, please."

There was grind and thud as a book fell from a shelf. It wasn't a cheap paperback but his mother's silk-bound copy of Hamlet. He could read the title from where he sat in her chair.

"No," he said. "I'm sorry. Mother, please. What can I do?"

Stupid Hamlet, a play about a son and his mother, how he gets her and himself killed trying to fix everything in all the wrong ways. Malfoy sprang out of the chair, grabbed the book, and threw it hard at the wall. The spine cracked, the pages fanned, and a square of heavy white parchment drifted away from the rest. He lifted it from the ground. It was a picture of Narcissa, young and elegant, with a shining perfect baby on her lap. On its edge she had written in elaborate black handwriting " Our Draco, Love Always."

Malfoy sank to the floor, his head on the seat of her chair, and wept.

\--------------------------------

Hermione hadn't gone back to the house the evening Tim Granger came home from the hospital. Instead, she had fallen asleep late in the afternoon and stayed that way for hours. By the time she was awake again, their house was dark, their car gone. Maybe they'd done another runner, like they had when they left London for Canada in the first place. She couldn't tell, couldn't do anything but wait, and sleep.

Her job at the dental clinic had expired with the end of summer, so there was no awkward, forced end to it. On the first of her days of unemployment, she wandered around the yard, lifting leaves on raspberry bushes, looking for the last of the fruit, though most of it was now soggy, its flavour deteriorated to empty sweetness. As she worked, she heard a tapping. It was Tim Granger, knocking softly on his kitchen window, waving her inside.

"Where's Mum?" she asked in her parents' kitchen.

"Just off to the shop," he said. "She thought I was sleeping or she would have insisted I come. We're pretending I don't know that she's trying to keep you and me from talking alone."

"Does she still think you're off your head?"

He sighed. "We're not talking about that either."

"Oh, Dad."

"Hermione, we don't have much time. Forgive me for not asking every detail about how you've spent the last few years. For now, just tell me: you're not actually studying dentistry, are you?"

He looked so hopeful but she had to confess. "I'm afraid not."

He nodded glumly, moving on to the next, more serious question. "And Draco - I see he's left. Was that registry office wedding just a sham to ingratiate yourself with us? It was so strange."

She bowed her head. "It was at first. But it's not anymore."

"And he's gone all the same?"

She nodded. "Yes. It was unavoidable."

He tousled her hair. "And I suppose it's all the fault of the trouble between you and us - "

"We're handling it, Dad," she said. "Don't worry about it. We need to figure out what are we going to do about Mum."

He chuckled. "Well, I suppose the easy thing would be for you to get her the same way you got me. No warning, right in the back. But it didn't go so well, did it."

She blushed. "I suppose not."

He patted her shoulder. "Ever since I woke up in the hospital, I've had nothing but time to think about our family situation. Do you remember, Hermione, when we told you we wanted you to undergo sound, proper orthodontic treatment to fix your teeth?"

She smirked. "But then I got hexed at school by - erm - someone - and the medic who treated me shrunk the teeth down to size through magic."

"Yes, well, it may be time to make good on that broken promise," Tim said. "What I'm saying is I'd like you to let your mother recover her memory naturally."

"Dad, magic is natural for thousands of people - "

"Of course, of course," Tim rushed to say. "What I mean is, let her recover you in her own way. It's not as hopeless as you might think. She's come this far on her own, which is truly remarkable. And, there are some things you don't know about her life as Monika Wilkins." He told Hermione about the lingering traces of motherhood in Monika's body, the visits with therapists, the agonizing emptiness she could neither resolve nor ignore.

"She's always known," he finished. "In her way, she's never forgotten you. Leave her to it, just a little longer. Unless she asks you to use magic, leave her to it."


	27. Twenty-seven

Tim Granger had succeeded in convincing his wife to spend an afternoon with their tenant, former dental apprentice, and alleged daughter who was stubbornly languishing in the flat at the back of their yard, unemployed but still making her rent somehow, spending the daylight hours after they were home from the clinic walking woefully through the trees and bushes on their land, in view of the house so they couldn't forget her, ghostlike. Even without Hermione's presence, the Wilkins's relationship was odd now, with Wendell slipping into memories of a life he had with Ann Granger, as if Monika had been there too.

It was untenable. And so she agreed to meet with Hermione, but with a few conditions. First: no one would address her as Mum, Mother, Mummie, Ma, etc. Second: Hermione would leave that light stick of hers - the one she flashed at Tim just before he woke up in the hospital - lying on the kitchen counter in the flat, in plain view, and absolutely out of her hand. Third: the time they spent together would be a working visit. Hermione would help them lug boxes of expired dental records from the office to the beach where they would burn them in a fire pit, Upper Raleigh's version of municipal recycling.

Hermione had seemed elated and eager when Tim extended the invitation, but after lunch on the Saturday of the outing, she didn't appear on their back porch to meet them. Monika is every bit as terrible as Ann Granger at waiting, and it wasn't long before she and Tim were climbing up the stairs to the attic, their voices ringing through the open space of the garage.

"We're just knocking. I'm not going in there, where she keeps that light stick."

"Come now, Niki. She's already given me her word of honor she won't point it at you unless you ask her to."

"No, I won't risk it. She's turned it on you without permission twice already."

"Three times, if you count the first."

"Stop that."

Tim rapped at the door, waited.

"Where is she?"

"Shush, Niki, I'm listening."

"I've got a key. Should we have a look…"

"Why? Do you think she might be trapped inside, in trouble?"

"Well, not really. But it is odd, don't you think?"

"You can look in on her if you like, but I'm not going. What if they're indisposed over some - family matter, newlyweds and all that."

"No, Draco's been gone for days."

"To be sure, but the trouble might still be some - woman's issue."

"What on earth are you talking about? And anyway, you're a medical professional, Dr. Granger."

"Yes, but try telling that to - "

They jumped as the door opened. Bleary-eyed, Hermione leaned against the jamb, still wearing sleeping clothes. She had been in another one of her heavy sleep cycles when voices started encroaching on her inner quiet, like a dream where she and Malfoy were bickering lightly, only he had a feminine voice and she had a masculine one.

"Sorry," she said. "I was ill this morning. But I think I've slept it off. I'll just change."

Monika frowned, leaning closer to Hermione's face. "You've got petechiae."

"What?"

Tim leaned in to see for himself. "Ah, yes. Tiny red spots, around your eyes, burst blood vessels from too much pressure. You must have been violently sick to your stomach."

Hermione touched her own face. "Oh. Yes, but then I felt much better now. Must have been something I ate. I should have known from the strong smell. I'm just tired now."

Monika was still frowning. "And your eyes look sunken. Have you been drinking enough water, replenishing your fluids?"

Hermione groaned. "I've been trying. But it's like everything is an orange-only puking pastille."

Monika mouthed the words "puking pastille" to herself.

Tim clucked his tongue. "I'll nip up to the house and bring back some travel tabs, in case the nausea comes back."

Monika snagged his arm as he turned to leave. "I think we're all out, dear. You'll have to run to the chemist's and while you're there - " she tugged him close enough to whisper her final request into his ear.

He coughed noisily as he straightened up. But all he said was, "Right."

"Will you wait inside with me?" Hermione called as Monika turned to leave as well. "My wand is on the counter, like you wanted, and I promise I won't step within reach of it."

Monika sighed, looked at Hermione's pathetic face again. "Oh, go on then."

The flat was a mess with very old-looking, very heavy-looking books strewn over the floor next to the sofa.

"Sorry about the mess," Hermione said. "It's not usually like this. I was getting desperate and sloppy this morning, looking for an anti-nausea spell." She circled the room, as if she didn't know what to do with herself now that her mother was in it with her.

"Quick pacing and lie down," Monika said.

"But I'll fall back to sleep. I know I will. I can't seem to help it. It's so odd."

Monika huffed. "Not really. Probably a good sign, actually. Don't fret. I'll wake you when he's back from the chemist. Though, may I ask," she said, suddenly too polite, "how long has it been since you last - saw Draco?"

"Twelve days," Hermione reported without pausing to count. "It's a good thing he's not here to catch this flu. Be sure to wash your hands before you leave, Mu - Monika."

She hummed.

Hermione sipped at a glass of water and grew quiet while Monika scanned the pages of a spell book: Anti-ipecac-tum, Stop-sick, Ad No-seum… Hermione closed a book with her toe. "I've tried every anti-vomit charm I know. Nothing works."

Monika scoffed. "Imagine that."

When Tim was back with a small paper bag, she shook Hermione awake where she'd drifted off on the bed.

"Now, we've got you some proper medicine, Hermione, but you can't take any until you do this first. Otherwise, it might be dangerous." She tore open a box from the chemist's shop and handed Hermione a small plastic wand and a booklet of instructions. "Take it to the toilet with you, do what it says, and bring it back here."

\------------------------------------

Draco Malfoy spent his days snapping back and forth between the manor and the court district in London, meeting after meeting, until a date was announced to hear the motion to have his mother moved from Cross Crispin correctional centre to the forensic ward of St. Mungo's hospital. It would be on the coming Monday. It was a relief to have it scheduled, but the wait would be excruciating. He considered trying to arrange an emergency visit to Cross Crispin to tell her the news himself, but whenever he thought of it, alone in the manor, he felt assured that she knew well enough already.

The irony was that the part of her she was able to send out to haunt the house felt more like her true self than the personage he'd met when he visited the prison. In prison, she shrieked and clawed at him. In the manor, she left his name and line drawings of dragons in the dust layer in the kitchen. She continued to slide books off the shelves in the library for him, and that Saturday morning, she had left a trinket box on the pillow next to his head for him to find when he woke up. It held a delicate ring, too fine and small for him to wear. The metal was newly buffed platinum with a single pale emerald sunk into the band, his mother's wedding gift to Hermione.

He slid it onto his ring finger, down to the first knuckle, thinking of heirs again. Once more, he questioned his own commitment to the contraception spell. In the torrent of powerful, confusing, conflicting feelings that night - could it be possible?

Someone was coming. He could sense it. The gates had already let them in and they were almost at the house now. He opened the doors to his old schoolmates Blaise, Theo Nott, and Pansy.

Pansy stepped into the house first, advancing over the threshold, surveying the entrance hall, the grand staircase as if she was mistress of all of it.

"Nice work, getting a new hearing for your Mum, Malfoy. Well done," Nott was saying.

"Yes, so we've come to get you ready," Pansy said. "Get you back to looking like your old self before your face winds up in all the papers on Monday morning."

"That's why Pansy's come anyway," Blaise smirked. "She got us to come when the gates wouldn't let her pass."

Pansy tossed her head, as if it wasn't humiliating that Narcissa had stricken her from the list of people allowed to approach the house without an escort. "Sit down and take off your shirt, Draco. I'm cutting your hair."

Nott blinked. "Wow."

"Nah, nah," Blaise argued. "I like it the way it is. Like old Lucius, in his glory days between the - well, in better days."

"That's exactly the problem," Pansy went on, her hand in Malfoy's hair now, flipping it, lifting it. "The hearing will be the public debut of the new Malfoy family. No more sleek, dangerous, silky - "

"Stop," Nott was covering his ears.

Malfoy was already raising a hand to push hers away. She grabbed it. "And rings might not be a good wardrobe choice right now either. Humble and modest is what sees us through these court days. This one's not too ostentatious, but you should really try to find one that fits."

"It's fine," he said. "It's not mine. I'm just holding it for someone."

Pansy stamped her foot. "You're not listening, Draco. Do you want our help or not?"

Looking like his father had been an asset when the time had come to raise hell with his solicitors, but Pansy might be right about it being a misstep now.

Blaise was shaking his head. "I still say you keep the look, mate. It'll remind people of those Gralfoy Affair pictures from the Daily Prophet. People ate that up. Best press you've had - well, ever."

Malfoy's face flushed red. "What did they get photos of?"

Nott laughed at him. "Relax, Malfoy. Just the two of you walking around overseas, boring and decent as anything."

Pansy tossed her head again. "Well since you're all such experts on page four, you should know that Draco might be vulnerable right now, and you should have more respect for his feelings."

Malfoy rubbed his forehead with his fist. "What are you on about?"

They told him about the lifecycle of the Gralfoy Affair on the gossip page, that the latest rumor was that it was over. "So what I'm saying," Blaise finished, "is you're well-poised to sway public sympathy if you can keep their imaginations caught up in a forbidden love narrative a little longer. Leave the ring on. Give them something to make them think the whole star-crossed lovers thing is still a go."

Pansy was livid. "How can you ask him to do that? The poor broken-hearted - "

"It's not over," Malfoy said, loud enough to be heard over their voices. "With Granger - it's more on than ever."

He told them as little as he could without the story becoming incoherent, but he told them about ending up married and then wanting to stay that way, but having to leave in order to properly recover her parents. Away from Hermione, the story felt like it had been slipping away from him. It became less dream-like, more real when he said it out loud, when he saw other people reacting to it. And Pansy, after their history together, she deserved to know with perfect clarity where she stood.

"Wow," Nott said again. "Goyle got married too, you know. He got paired with the daughter of one of the families that was sentenced to a massive fine instead of jail. They wound up destitute so they swapped a girl for a cut of the Goyle fortune. Part of the agreement was that he'd be kept away from home, traveling on business most of the time. Doesn't seem to bother him."

Malfoy found it strange that no one had mentioned this during the time they'd spent together yesterday. Maybe there was more he didn't know. "He hasn't got any kids, has he?"

Nott snorted with laughter.

"I mean," Malfoy was sputtering. "You know how - how once people settle down, even if they're young, sometimes the conviction needed to cast a good contraception charm - slips and - maybe Goyle -"

Blaise was doubled over, howling. "Goyle casting a contraception charm - I'm gonna be sick, I'm gonna die. I'm dying right now."

Pansy swore. "How old are you guys?"

"Sorry, Pansy," Nott was saying, wiping his eyes. "No, Malfoy. No baby Goyles yet. Maybe if they find out how to brew them up in cauldrons. Who knows..."

Blaise collapsed into laughter again.

"It's not funny," Pansy insisted, wiping her eyes herself. "To have a contraception spell slip, the person who casts it must be evilly opportunistic or so in love they're powerless to stop themselves from connecting to their partner through a child. It's beautiful and sacred, and if anyone ever loved me like that, I'd give him all the babies I could stand."

"So, none?" Nott said.

She swore again, standing up. "Good luck on Monday, Draco. Tell your mother I wish your mother a speedy recovery. Goodbye." She swept past the rest of them, moving toward the doors of Malfoy Manor.

"We'd better go too," Nott said. "In case the gates won't open for her again."

Malfoy said nothing, but he knew that, for Pansy Parkinson, the gates would swing wide to let her leave.

\--------------------------------------

After staying locked in the loo long enough to read every word of the information booklet, Hermione stepped out, the plastic chemist shop wand in her hand.

"It can't be right," was all she said.

Monika gestured for Hermione to show her the results through the window of the pregnancy test. "That depends on what it says. If it says no, it might still be too early. If it says yes, then it has to be right."

"But it can't be."

"Why not? You have - a proper marriage, don't you?"

She may have, but to speak of it so soon still made her blush. "Yes, but we used - something."

Monika did not scoff. She did not kick at the piles of books, the ones which, apparently, were not only full of useless anti-nausea spells but also flawed contraceptive spells, and demand to know what Hermione was thinking, persisting in acting like magic was real when the stakes were so high. Instead, she pulled Hermione down to sit with her on the sofa. "There's always a margin of error in contraception. The only completely effective birth control is abstinence, and that's certainly not at all appropriate between a young husband and wife who love each other."

Hermione bent over, sobbing into her hands, not so much at the thought of pregnancy, but at the mention of love.

Tim sat on the arm of the sofa, patting her back. "There, there, Hermione. It's unexpected news but rather brilliant too, once you get used to it, if I do say so myself." He tried not to giggle. "Granddad! Shame Draco missed the big moment though - "

She wailed louder.

"When is he coming back?" Monika called to her over the sobbing.

"I - I still don't know. It depends on so much."

She frowned. "There isn't any trouble between you, is there? You're properly in love and all that, aren't you?"

"Y-yes." The admission sent her off into a new paroxysm.

Monika was patting her back along with Tim. "What's the hold up, then? Seems silly for you to be apart if you'd really rather not. Text him that you're poorly and he needs to come home right away. And then tell him face-to-face."

Hermione could hardly speak. "W-we - he can't - come back - un-until after - or else you'll - "

"Now, crying is just making you produce excess mucus," Monika interrupted, trying to relieve Hermione from the burden of talking until she'd regained some composure. "Extra mucus in your nasopharynx will only make your stomach sicker. That's how it was with me, anyway, when I was expecting - "

The room fell instantly silent. Hermione hiccuped past the last of her tears.

Tim rose to his feet. "Ann?"

Monika covered the base of her throat with one hand, She repeated herself, "When I was expecting…"

Hermione slid off the couch, falling to her knees on the floor in front of where her mother sat.

"When I was expecting," she went on, "I wanted a daughter."

Tim broke into laughter. "Yes!"

She grabbed at Hermione's hand. "Where is it? Where is the rest of it?"

"It's here," Tim said. "It's like I've been telling you. It's our Hermione. She's come back for us."

She threw Hermione's hand back at her. "I don't understand."

"Mum, you've got to let me help you. You've discovered and remembered so much on your own and it's brilliant. But now, please trust me. Let me reverse the spell. I charmed your memories in a panic and under bad advice I can never completely forgive. It was a mistake and I'm sorry, and please let me fix it. I can't be happy, I can't have you, I can't have Malfoy, I can't have anything until I fix it."

She scoffed. "Fix it? You sent poor Tim to the hospital."

"That was just because my feelings were torn, because Draco was here and something selfish in me wanted to protect my life as it was more than it wanted to risk going back to whatever waits for us at home in England. My feelings for him divided my loyalties and ruined the spell. So I had to ruin that life so it wouldn't weaken my resolve anymore and cause more accidents. And he's gone. Now I can't have him back until after your memory is restored, if that ever happens."

Monika dropped her fist on the sofa cushion at her side. "Rubbish, just tell him to come back."

"No, I choose you, Mum. So choose me in return." Maybe it was the tiniest Slytherin in her belly that moved Hermione to say the rest. "Until you let me fix you, my child can't have their father. Please, Mum, choose me, me and my fatherless child."

Monika bowed her head into her hands. "What an awful thing to say, Madam Malfoy."

"I'm sorry."

"Fine," Monika roared. "You may try one time. Get the stick."


	28. Twenty-eight

Unable to sleep, Draco Malfoy took his wife's wedding ring from the end of his finger and snapped it back into its box. He was thinking of Pansy Parkinson's explanation of the two reasons a contraception spell could fail. What had she called it - "beautiful and sacred" when love and connection overrode the magic? Sure, it was beautiful as long as it was disrupted by mutual love. Maybe that was where the sacred came in - something like fate, who knows. How much was their agency, some latent but still potent power to choose, involved in a spell slip? How much of love and its consequences was ever choice?

And Hermione did love him. There were a thousand things for him to be unsure of right now, but not that. He'd never told her, never asked her, and she'd never said it but - that night, she was the one who came to him, asking for everything. Love had to be part of everything. And asking him for love was the same as confessing her own to him - wasn't it?

In the darkness of the room he'd grown up in, he blinked at the ceiling, at the faint stars charmed into it, barely visible in pale luminescent grey. That night with her came back to him, a regular meditation of his by now, intensifying his heart beat, dilating his eyes. The memory of her skin tingled in his fingertips. That night every distance between them finally closed - warm and sublime, urgent, ecstatic, and so sad. He had cast the spell while grieving leaving her, when his desire to stay bound to her was at its peak. What he gave her truly was everything. And if his mother was right, everything was much vaster than either of them had known. They were not alone in it. There were worlds, futures.

He sat up in bed. Was it still too early for her to be able to tell? There was probably a book on the technicalities of human reproduction downstairs in the library. But that was the kind of thing the Muggles would know too, and the Muggle-wand was right here in the room. He tapped it with his wand to power it up, and asked what was the soonest she might be able to detect it. There was no simple answer. It depended on too many things - things she would just be learning about herself if...

And he couldn't very well ask her to check - send a huge white animal flying across the ocean, up to the Wilkins's place with a letter saying, "My darling, it would seem I'm far more into you than I realized. Can you go see a doctor?"

The Muggle-wand was still in his hand, connected to all the other Muggle-wands on the planet, hundreds of millions of them. But the only person's number he had in his phone was Tim Granger's, and he wasn't about to involve him. Instead, he'd buy a second one in the city on Monday, after court, and send it to Hermione in Upper Raleigh so they could send messages. The Muggles really are clever, in their way.

The screen glowed helpfully in the dark room. He swiped at it, looking through the photos in its memory. He hadn't deleted the last round of shots taken between their bickering, and he was glad, smirking, flicking through the screens. He reached the photo Tim Granger had sent him, of Malfoy and Hermione, newly married, Hermione in that white dress she hadn't wanted to spend much money on, standing arm-in-arm with him against parking lot honeysuckle shrubbery.

Here in his phone was the key to - how had Blaise put it - keeping the Gralfoy Affair in the public imagination, swaying sympathy. All he had to do was get this image of the Gralfoy wedding to the Daily Prophet and people would be fawning over them again, just like the airport customs officer wizard with all the daughters had done when he took Malfoy off the no-fly list without proper documentation. The fact was, Malfoy was in need of an official's good graces again, this time for his mother's sake, and Gralfoy Affair fans might be the best chance he had. No one at the newspaper would trace this phone to him. It was a Muggle device, for crying out loud. No one would suspect him of being the opportunist who revived the story that had gone cold after the appearance of that photo of him alone on the deck of the Hightail.

But opportunistic - "evilly opportunistic" - that was how Pansy had described the other reason a contraception spell might fail. Maybe it wasn't love but a deeply seated drive to preserve the Malfoy family from any more devastation that had been at work when he botched the spell and created a mixed-blood heir. If even his mad mother had made the connection, how hard could it be for his subconscious to have done the same?

He turned the phone face down on the table, its light disappearing so he could see the stars on the ceiling again. Where was that mother-author, the one Hermione hadn't mentioned in weeks? Here was the point in the plot where she could reveal the kind of character he truly was. If she was real, she must have known all along. She would dictate for him, set a scene where he could prove whether he acted out of love for a new family, one with Hermione, or loyalty to his original family, one with his mother. It was something like a love triangle - one of the oldest plots there is.

Maybe the scene had already been set when the author-mother established that the noblest heros in their stories were always mothers. He looked down, to where he knew the phone lay on the table in the dark. In that story, he must be the man who would lift the photos out of the Muggle device and release them into the wizarding world, doing right by past heroes, and saving his own mother.

No.

He didn't reach for the phone. Even if Hermione was something like a mother now too, his life with her - short, intense, happy for the first time since childhood - it was still an act of defiance, his and hers, both of them acting in spite of everything written before.

That was it.

The reason the contraception spell hadn't worked was not something he had to discover, but something he had to decide - for love or for filial loyalty - it was still up to him, to them.

He crossed the floor of his bedroom, sat down at his desk in the dark. By the Muggle-wand's light, he found his old school trunk underneath it, lifted the lid, and dropped the phone and his secret wedding photo inside.

\-------------------------------

As if she was facing a firing squad, Monika Wilkins stood against the wall of her garage. Hermione's wand was cloaked in her pocket, and she tried not to seem like a monster as she prepared to reverse the memory charm. It had failed once, and succeeded once. This trial, the last one ever, would prove whether she could do it or not.

"Dad, I'll have you step outside, if you please. And take this with you." She reached through Malfoy's concealment charm and seemed to produce a piece of equipment the size of a sewing machine out of nowhere. "Sorry, but I need my attention undivided, I'm afraid."

Tim squinted. "Is that a spectrometer?"

"Something like it," she said. "It's a gift from my Malfoy. It had better not distract me either. Can you take it, Dad? Mind the prism. Thank you."

She was alone with her mother, each of them standing on opposite walls. Monika blinked across the space between them.

"I don't suppose," Hermione began, "I don't suppose I might ask you to turn around, or at least close your eyes?"

"No, you may not."

"Right." She drew her wand. "On the count of three then?"

"Yes."

"One, two - Memento."

She fired early, but Monika seemed to expect it, raising her arms over face before the white light engulfed her. When the flash faded, she kept her arms over her face, as if stupefied.

Hermione took a single step toward her, terrified.

"Wait," her mother said, her voice barely audible. "A moment."

Tim had seen the flash through the windows. He was rattling the door open, bolting back inside. Both women were still on their feet. Monika seemed to be cowering and Hermione looked ready to pounce. They were a tableau, like an old painting, motionless, caught in a single disordered instant helpless to resolve itself. No one made a sound.

He couldn't bear it. "Niki?"

Slowly, she uncovered her face, drew a breath, turned her head toward her husband, told him, "I've always liked that. Never stop calling me that. But here," she held out her arms, an almost religious, saintly pose, "here is Ann."

Hermione jumped, dropped her wand to the floor. "Mum!"

"Yes, darling. Come to your mother."

In the upstairs of the Granger's house in Upper Raleigh, Ann was making a bed for her daughter. She would stay at the house with them, in their spare room, until they could get hold of Draco and bring him back to take care of her. Tim had the number for the Muggle-wand stored in his phone and he sent a message saying both he and Ann were doing well ;) and needed to see him right away.

Hermione smirked. "He won't know what to make of ;). We'd better tell him the rest in person." She was lying in the bed now, tucked under a quilt that smelled like her childhood, Ann sitting beside her, combing Hermione's hair with her fingers. From years of practice, she could still do it without pulling. Poor girl, inheriting Tim's bushy hair - not bad on a man but wild on a little girl. All those primary school mornings, fighting to brush it into plaits. They eventually gave up and let it spring everywhere, the way it had been when they sent her off to Hogwarts. Hermione lay under her mother's fingers like a happy cat.

"How do you reckon he'll take the news?" Ann asked.

"Shock. It'll be all over his face." Her eyes were closed, as if she could see him already.

Ann laughed. "Yes. Then what?"

Hermione opened her eyes. "Then I'll have some questions of my own." She explained about magical contraception, how Malfoy had taken the responsibility upon himself, and possible reasons it had failed.

Ann hummed. "Not surprising in the least. From the moment I first saw the pair of you in my dental office, it was clear the feelings were unequal, more on his side than on yours."

"Mum, that's not true."

"Course it is. Just like between your father and me. Much more feeling from my side than his."

"Niki," Tim protested from the next room.

"I knew you were listening, Timothy," she called back. "Has he rung yet?"

"No, of course not. It's the middle of the night there. Best just forget it for now. You'll have to stay up until 3am to catch him if he gets up at 7 o'clock."

Hermione groaned into her pillow as her mother patted her head. Tim left his phone on her bedside table, so she wouldn't have to ask him for updates anymore. It was 10pm on a Saturday night, barely Sunday in Britain, and Draco Malfoy would not extract his Muggle-wand from his school trunk to receive any messages until after his mother's morning in court, not until Monday.

\--------------------------------------

Word that mad Madam Malfoy would be appearing in an open hearing on her mental fitness had spread through the British wizarding press. It would be a smaller tribunal than a full Wizengamot, but it would also be one of the first official motions for clemency for the witches and wizards convicted after the war. It was touted as a test case for the reconciliation about to begin throughout the wizarding judicial system, and thus, it was important for everyone to be following it. This was all true. But so was the fact that it was hard to miss a chance to see one half of the duo that had sheltered the Dark Lord laid low - the cold glamor of an old family now raving with madness.

The solicitors advised Draco Malfoy to arrive at the Ministry early, while it was still dark. In the dungeons on the tenth floor, he sat in the first row of a courtroom gallery and waited as the seats behind him filled with reporters and spectators. The clerks, prosecutors, and Narcissa's defense team entered first. The judges would enter last. In the time in between, Narcissa herself was led in, her hands and feet chained. She hadn't arrived dressed in her prison uniform but in the clothing she had worn the day she was convicted and taken away, dark and ornate, lavish and faded.

Perhaps the change of clothes was to grant her some dignity, perhaps it was to curb any sympathy she might have provoked dressed like a waifish prisoner. Whatever it was meant to do, she couldn't have looked any more pathetic, in stiff dusty clothing, tailored to the robust elegance of a form she no longer had. The image of refined aristocracy had vanished. She had always been pale but she was positively transparent now, the veins in her forehead visible from where Draco sat. Her eyes were wide and wild, like prey. The Madam Malfoy who had been tried here years ago no longer existed, anyone could see it.

Draco's heart crashed when she found his face in the front row of the crowd. Her mouth fell open and for a moment he was afraid she was going to shriek for joy at seeing him there. She didn't. She said nothing as the guard from Cross Crispin's conducted her to her chair, separated from her son by the bar.

She turned in her seat. "My boy, angel boy. Have you asked her? About the heir?"

"Mother, please. Don't think of that now."

Her lawyer was turning now too, whispering loudly. "Madam Malfoy, you must remain engaged in the proceedings. If you are distracted, they may use the chains in the chair to - maintain your focus."

Draco swore. Still bloody barbaric. She reached for him, wrist chains clanking, her palm against his cheek, her eyes teary and clear. He leaned over the bar, his long white fingers covering hers.

"Madam Malfoy, please..."

Everyone rose as the judges entered, purple robes swishing as they took their seats on a raised bench.

"Motion from one Narcissa Black Malfoy to divert her detention at Cross Crispin Correctional Institute for Witches and serve the remaining twelve months of her sentence for aiding and abetting sedition in the forensic psychiatric facility at St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies."

"Yes, m'lord," her lawyer replied, standing. "Madam Malfoy has been unduly traumatized by her detention in a conventional prison and now requires psychiatric medical attention best provided in the facility proposed in the motion as provided."

The chief judge hummed. "Yes, well haven't they all."

There was a titter of laughter through the crowd.

"Order. Or-duh."

The prosecutor was rising. "Truly, Madam Malfoy's misfortunes at Cross Crispin Correctional are nothing beyond what is common to all of its inmates. The institution is not Azkaban but it isn't meant to be a holiday. The Crown's position is that it is appropriate and adequate for the rehabilitation of even Madam Malfoy."

"M'lord, we tread on new legal ground today," the Malfoy's lawyer said, rising into his rhetoric. "We evolve as an enlightened magical society beyond correctional practices of medieval torture and retribution, to those of rehabilitation and reconciliation…"

It went on like that for hours. Prison psychologists and wardens testified. The lawyers exchanged arguments. The judges hummed and frowned. Narcissa's eyes darted from speaker to speaker but she said nothing. Her lawyer pulled her to standing as the judges left to take a recess.

Draco knew that as long as he stayed in the courtroom, where no cameras were permitted, he would be safe from the press. He should stay. He should wait.

But it didn't seem to be going well. The lawyers put him off, disappearing into to an office to work out a different strategy. He didn't interfere. At this point, threatening them would do nothing. His head was throbbing. The hearing wasn't meant to go on so long. And he'd just heard that Dr. Berlant from St. Mungo's was on the roster to testify when they reconvened. Pressure was mounting inside his head, reaching the brink where the old innocentia spell would have tripped, but it was gone. He couldn't break down here, not when he was posing as Narcissa's responsible guardian, not when Berlant would be here, gloating.

He was in the lift, on the grey stone sidewalk outside the Ministry, disapparating back to the Manor, just for the duration of the recess, just to regain his composure. He was master of the house so decidedly now that he could apparate inside of it, appearing at the foot of the grand staircase. In relief, his breath rushed out of him, and he slumped to sitting on the piano bench, the keys sounding beneath his arm as he caught himself.

The sound was answered with another, something crashing in the library.

"Give it a rest, Mother."

There was more noise from the library, not the ghostly sound of disembodied magic, of inanimate objects charmed and pushed against each other. It was the sound of living footsteps.

Someone was here.


	29. Twenty-nine

At the sound of footsteps in his mother's library, Draco Malfoy sprang to his feet, clipping through the grand hall toward where the door stood ajar. If he hadn't been so discomfited from his morning in court, he might have moved with greater caution, reminding himself that the intruder in the library might not be someone the house knew and freely admitted. It might be a powerful threat that had broken through the old family magic. Narcissa's day in court would be a perfect time for someone to make a strong statement against clemency for Death Eaters. But he thought of none of that as he stormed into the library forcefully enough to dent one wood-paneled wall with the door's crystal knob.

The library was brighter than he'd seen it in years, the heavy curtains drawn apart to let beams of sunshine light up the dust motes, prisms in the diamond cut windows throwing broken rainbows on the dark walls. At a shelf next to the window, hastily restacking spilled books, puzzling over their arcane cataloguing system, was Hermione.

She startled as the door crashed open.

"Draco Lucius Malfoy."

"Granger! How did you - "

"Don't you 'Granger' me, after what you did." Hermione had crossed the library, coming within arm's reach of him now, striking at his chest and arms with one of his mother's dainty leather-bound books of medieval French love poetry, not hard enough to damage him but not lightly either. "You vanish, across the ocean, for nearly two weeks - "

He raised his arms in defense. "Stop. Ow, you told me to go, not to distract you - "

She kept swinging. "Not a single albatross, not replying to messages on the Muggle-wand - "

"I had to shut it off so - stop! Let me explain."

If Malfoy's childhood had been peopled with parents or siblings who had ever scolded or punished him, maybe he would have learned to submit to a well-deserved, enthusiastic reprimand like the one Hermione was serving. As it was, he knew to do nothing but bring it to an end, grabbing her wrists in each of his hands, and tucking them into the small of her back. The defiled poetry book fell to the floor as he spun her around to press her back against the library door, holding her there with the length of his own body against hers. She twisted against him, panting and fighting.

"Listen," he said into her face as she squirmed between him and the door. "I was going to contact you today, but later. It's my mother's court day. Everything is crazy. I'm sorry."

At the apology, and at the un-ignorable evidence that her struggling was not at all unpleasant for him, she became less frantic.

"Let me go," she said.

"I'd rather not."

"Malfoy!"

He let go of her wrists but left his arms around her waist, pinning hers to her sides. He should have kept explaining, questioning, but this close to her, all he could think to say as he bowed his face into her hair was, "By the stars, I missed you."

She scoffed, turning her face away as he bent as if to kiss her. "Yes, but you're still able to go so quiet my Dad put me on a flight to find you myself. Do you know how much fathers-in-law hate that?"

Malfoy lifted his face from her hair, wincing. "I'm sorry. I had a good reason but - tell him I'm sorry."

She sniffed. "You can tell him yourself. They're here. No, not in the manor, in Heathgate, looking for their old stuff."

He stood back from her, his hands still gripping her arms. "They came with you? Both of them? So then…"

She couldn't help smiling. "Yes, their memories are completely uncharmed. I've been trying to tell you - "

He interrupted her, pulling her to him again, laughing his relief. "Oh, you brilliant girl. Of course you did it. I knew that was a good spell." He gathered her closer, bending to nestle the curve of his neck and shoulder against her face.

Still wriggling, she wedged her arms between them. "Quit trying to subdue me with your pheromones."

He smirked. "Why, does it work?"

"It works better than some of your magic," she said, her voice rising in volume and pitch. "Draco Malfoy, your contraception spell - it slipped."

The shock she expected to see on his face did not materialize. Instead, he palmed the back of her head, gathering her face into his shoulder again, groaning. "I'm so sorry. Believe me, I meant it to work. But in fairness, you did ask me for everything."

She slapped at his chest. "That was me seducing you, not ordering a pram." She looked up at his un-shocked face again. "You already knew."

"I didn't," he said. "I honestly didn't know for sure until you told me just now. Though my mother has been going on with some nonsense about us producing a mixed-blood heir to show the world the Malfoy family's not all that bad. So, yeah, it's not the first time the possibility had been raised."

She frowned. "Your mother?"

"Yes, she's insane. Leave it."

"Leave it?" she railed, pushing at his chest. "That's easy for you to say. How can I just leave it? And what am I supposed to do with myself now now that you've gone and - "

He kissed her forehead and at that, the first touch of his lips to her skin since they'd been apart, she couldn't seem to fight anymore. Instead, she raised her face to his.

"Do whatever you want with yourself," he said, kissing her cheek. "Whatever plans you had, don't change them." Her eyes were closed now but he kissed only her other cheek. "I'll take care of the child for you. All day, all night." She was standing on tip-toe, her lips parted when he kissed the end of her nose. "It'll be my responsibility. I'll take all the trouble on myself."

He had almost connected with her mouth but she had to protest.

"All the trouble for yourself? What about pregnancy, childbirth?"

He winced. "Is it bad already?"

"Yes!" she said. "I was sick the entire flight here. And apparating is a nightmare."

He groaned again, squeezing her tightly. "I'm so sorry. Honestly, I don't know how it happened. I always cast it perfectly before, whenever I was with - "

"Shh!" She covered his mouth with her hands.

He raised his hands to hers, folding his fingers over them. "I was just - so gutted to be losing you, even temporarily. I guess I - "

She kissed his mouth, gently at first, sweet with warm forgiveness which quickly boiled over. Draco staggered, as if about to collapse on her against the library door, falling back into exactly where they'd left off that dark morning in the Upper Raleigh attic. There was no time for that -- not yet. He fought to right himself, his hands on the door on either side of her head as she held him around his waist, her hands inside his jacket, hot through the fabric of his shirt.

He drew back, took her face in both of his hands. "Hermione, I love you - too much, far too much."

She lifted her chin, pecking at his mouth. "Well, obviously."

He smiled against her forehead, his hand dropping from her face to the space between them, resting on her abdomen, where a piece of himself had taken root by some magic more powerful than any spell. "Stay mad as long as you want," he said. "But stay with me, and let me take care of - ."

"Of everything."

"Yes, anything. Just don't go away."

\-----

It was Malfoy who had to go away, back to London where the recess in Narcissa's hearing would be ending, the court going back in session. "You'll be safe here now," he said. "Especially since you'll be staying with Perdita."

She scoffed. "Perdita?"

"Yeah." He stood behind her, bent to drop his chin to her shoulder, one hand on her stomach again. "Our Perdita."

She turned to face him. "Malfoy, you can't call her that."

He smirked. "Why not? It's the name of the daughter from The Winter's Tale. It's perfect."

"We will talk about this later. When we're back from London."

"You don't have to come," he said into her ear. "It's a hateful room. Berlant is set to testify today, which will be awkward. And it's full of gawking reporters. Go up to my bedroom and have a nap instead. I'd really like that, actually. Make the sheets warm and smelling good."

She combed his eyebrows with her thumbprint. "No, Malfoy, your mother is right. Appearing together is good for the family."

He frowned. "It looks so staged. And it's playing into my mother's cunning. She doesn't deserve it."

"Well, that's arguable," Hermione countered. "And even if she doesn't, what does family life have to do with what anyone deserves?"

The words slammed hard. Look at this woman - the one not even fellow golden trio alumnus Ron Weasley had deserved. She was standing here now carrying the grand-niece or -nephew of the dead witch who had tortured her under this very roof, until he did the very least he could, sending down the chandelier before running away with his mother. Draco Malfoy deserved her perhaps least of anyone, but he couldn't let her go all the same.

He held her close as they disapparated, her face hidden in his shoulder, eyes shut to help control the dizziness. They appeared in the immaculate greyness of Whitehall, her weight sagging in his arms, held against him. They stood for a moment on the sidewalk, arms clasped around each other, looking into one another's faces as he watched for her eyes to find their focus again. The photographer from the Daily Prophet assigned to monitor the visitors' entrance to the Ministry did not fail to notice, or to capture it. Page four might never look sweeter.

Most of the spectators were already seated when they arrived on the tenth floor. Only one person was still unseated, lingering outside the courtroom, held back until she was called for: Dr. Berlant. Malfoy rushed past her to rejoin his mother. But she raised a hand as Hermione passed, saying, "If you please, Jean."

"Of course."

Berlant looked over both of her shoulders. "I am about to testify," she began, "that St. Mungo's has so little to offer Narcissa Malfoy that she ought not come. Much of that opinion is based on the results we had with Draco Malfoy. He served his sentence but I wouldn't say successfully."

Hermione blinked. "What hasn't been successful about it?"

Berlant pursed her lips. "Hermione, the Muggles have identified something called Stockholm Syndrome - "

"I am fine," she said. "I'm healthy, happy, and with my parents again."

Berlant appeared taken aback. "Well, congratulations. Well-done," she said. "And Mr. Weasley? They say he's in Australia. Are the two of you no longer - "

"No."

"And Mr. Malfoy?"

She nodded. "Yes. He's with me. He has been through everything I've accomplished since I left the hospital. Maybe I could have done it without him. But it's better that I didn't have to."

Berlant's lips were pursed into a small pink smudge. But she was nodding, opening her notebook one last time.

Malfoy had agreed that, in order to not overwhelm Narcissa, Hermione would not sit on the front row of the gallery with him. Instead, she squeezed onto a wooden bench at the back of the room, and waited for the judges to return. The afternoon passed in dry clinical opinions. When Dr. Berlant testified that there was a high likelihood that Narcissa could indeed benefit from a transfer to St. Mungo's, the prosecutor gaped, scowled at the rest of his team. Based on their earlier interviews, this was not what he had expected her to say. He was left sputtering toward a hasty finish. Narcissa's lawyers were equally gobsmacked, and asked Dr. Berlant no questions at all. She had already given answers better than they had hoped for.

There was one more recess while the judges deliberated. The crowd dispersed, waiting outside the locked courtroom, reporters whispering dictation to their quills. Malfoy and Hermione sat on a bench, her head resting against his arm.

"You don't care if they see?" he asked her.

She hummed. "No, I don't care. And I need you to prop me up. I'm so sleepy."

He clucked his tongue, bobbed forward to drop a kiss on her head. "Behave yourself, Perdita."

She smiled into his face. "It's better to be sick, really. My parents say it's a sign she's healthy - he's healthy - oh, what have you done, Malfoy?"

The time to hear the verdict had come. The chief judge made a speech about personal and social responsibility. He endorsed the continuing modernization and evolution of corrections in wizarding Britain, and he ordered Narcissa Malfoy's sentence be diverted to St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies.

She rose as the judges left, porters from St. Mungo's replacing the guards who had escorted her into the courtroom. The crowd surged toward the door, hurrying to get out of the dark, stuffy chamber, Hermione moving against their current, toward the bar.

Malfoy and Narcissa came into her view just as Narcissa was drawing back from kissing her son on the cheek.

"Be good, Mother," he was saying. "We'll be 'round to see you soon."

Before the porters took her arms to lead her away, Hermione reached the bar, breathless. Narcissa let out a little cry as she and her daughter-in-law clasped hands for the first time.

\-------------------------------

One more apparation for the day, from the sidewalk outside the ministry to the upper floor of Malfoy Manor where Draco slept. Her daily nausea had abated and she was now hungry and tired. He was fussing over blankets and pillows, getting in her way as she tried to lie down in his bed.

"Let me do it, Malfoy," she said as he hovered over her.

Her protest just seemed to make him come closer. "No, I said I'd take care of everything. How else can I get you to forgive what I've done to you?"

She exaggerated a sigh, and linked her arms around his neck from where she lay on his pillow. "I forgive you, Malfoy. What else can I do? At least we'll have all our child-rearing done early in life."

He said nothing.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing, just," he bit his lip. "Just that, when our child-rearing finishes depends on how many kids we end up having."

She swatted his chest. "Draco Malfoy, you are never allowed to do the contraception spell casting ever again, for as long as you live."

He laughed, kissing her face. "No, I never will. Now, what do you want for dinner?"

She hummed, almost a purr as she considered. She dragged her hands from his shoulders to his waist and back up again. "I want a nap for dinner. Lie down with me, Malfoy. Let's have a nap for dinner."

He did not argue. And they did not nap.


	30. Thirty - The End

Perhaps they weren't so different from other generations of young people who had gone to war. They came through violence and death craving life, new life, and like their forebears - like their parents who had done the same - they wanted marriage and families while they were still very young themselves.

Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy may have been formed differently from the rest, needing more than ordinary circumstances to enlist them into wizarding Britain's new marriage and baby boom, but many of the others did not. Harry Potter was already engaged to Ginny Weasley, and Ron Weasley did not take long to discover that his desire for new life hadn't ended when Hermione left. He was, in all ways, a family man, and as soon as Lavender Brown would consent to it, he brought her back to England to marry her.

Everyone was invited.

It would be late winter, still too cold for a wedding under a tent at the Burrow, so they were to be married in a church in Rochester, where most of Lavender's family still lived.

"We can't skip it," Hermione told Malfoy when the invitation was first owled to the manor.

He sneered over the top of the book he was reading in his mother's green leather chair. "Sure we can. We've got loads of excuses. No one will expect you to be flitting around the countryside in the cold in your condition. By then, all it will take will be one look at you to give them all the excuses we need."

She waited two terrifying beats before she replied. "One look at me? What is THAT supposed to mean?"

"Nothing," he stammered, sitting up quickly, closing his book. "I mean, you'll be six months pregnant by then and - so you'll be - so beautiful - "

She was reaching for a book small enough to swat him with but he was filling her hands with his, lacing all of their fingers together. "Liar," she said, quick to cloud with sadness these days. New life, no matter how joyfully it is intended, is not easy to come by.

"Beautiful," Malfoy said again, more sincerely than defensively this time, as he ducked to kiss her. They were, after all, still newlyweds, and there wasn't much that physical affection couldn't make better by at least a little. "Don't go to the wedding if you don't want to."

She sighed. "No, it's not just an invitation, it's a peace offering, from Ron and maybe from the rest of my old life too. It's an invitation to be normal again, finally. And really I can't put it off any longer. I got sick and ran away to St. Mungo's last spring, but I need to reckon with what I left behind. And frankly, we will eventually want more to our world than what we have here and in Heathgate with Mum and Dad. I mean, when does a honeymoon become a hideout?"

"Hey, we've had visitors here. And you've met up with Potter and Weasley's sister in the city already."

She laughed, still melancholy. "Listen to the way you talk about them. And you weren't even with me when I met them, not even after I turned up for that ghastly dinner party at Goyle's."

He smirked. "I stand by my decision to not be within wand range of Potter and his girl when you told them about Perdita. However," he went on, "I'm through complaining and I'll go to the wedding with you. My hearty congratulations to Weasley for a long and happy life with a woman who isn't you couldn't be more sincere." He laid his head on her shoulder and his hand on the rising crest of her belly. "So all of them will know by now?"

She nodded. "Yes, they must. And since it's not in the papers yet, I'd say they're being very kind and discreet about it."

With the changes in her size, she needed a new dress to wear to the wedding. Malfoy suggested something in green which she refused. Self-conscious, her impulse was to hide in dark colours, and she chose something in a deep purple, with a floor length skirt hung from an empire waistline, falling in rich gathers over her abdomen. It was a style in which the pregnancy might not even be noticeable at a quick glance. She wore the dress with her hair piled on top of her head, leaving her neck and most of her shoulders bare. It was something like a costume from the ballroom scenes of a Muggle movie based on a Jane Austen novel - old-fashioned, modest. At least, it felt modest until Malfoy drew one fingertip from her ear to the edge of her shoulder in a slow, silky curve.

She wore very little jewelry, just a silver choker, Narcissa's emerald ring, and a bracelet of plastic beads spelling out "Granger," the charmed short-distance disaster alert hospital bracelet she hadn't worn since they moved into the flat in Upper Raleigh. Malfoy's matching bracelet was on his wrist too, tucked under his cuff.

Bundled in a heavy black coat, she took Malfoy's arm at the foot of the manor's grand staircase, ready to aparate to the Rochester train station she'd passed through with her parents many times before. He said he was ready but she looked him over once more.

She laughed. "Malfoy, your face."

"What about it?"

"You need to fix your face. You look like you're back on trial."

He lifted on eyebrow. "Aren't I?"

"You have to stop it," she said. "I'm not sure the Granger family cheek-kiss-fix is going to work this time, not even if I glued my lips to your face for the entire day."

"Yeah? Try it."

She laughed at him again. "Don't fret. Try to think about otters and flying in the rain and shaving brushes and spectral-meter prisms and honeysuckle and sleepy fairy tales..."

It was sweet, but he could promise her nothing.

In a spinning rush, they were in Rochester, in a train station along the River Medway. They walked up the hill toward the old cathedral, into its crypt, and through to the wizarding side of the church. The wedding party was not yet in position at the altar as Hermione and Malfoy took their seats near the back of the church, rows and rows behind the Weasley family. The pipe organ filled the space with rich but gentle music. Arm in arm even as they sat in a pew, Hermione clung to Malfoy like the last of the floating wreckage of a ship that had sunk.

She didn't see Ron and Harry come in but they were suddenly there, at the altar at the head of the nave. Ron's skin was ruddy with Australian sunshine, his hair bleached almost golden. He didn't look like her Ron any more than the elegant woman with the long bare neck looked like his Hermione. All at once, the stops on the organ were pulled out, music exploding through the pipes. And for the first time, she felt movement in her belly, the baby jolted awake by the noise. She gasped but no one heard.

Lavender and her father were making their entrance. The baby turned again as Hermione rose to stand. She dropped her hand over the spot where she'd felt it but the moment had passed. She would tell Malfoy later, when it wouldn't have to be whispered.

The ceremony proceeded as they usually do, whether in storefront Canadian Muggle registry offices or ancient English churches. She hadn't seen Ron kiss Lavender in years. The blaring organ playing over it couldn't have been more fitting.

In the hall afterwards, she began the difficult work of exploring the new terrain of her old life. Ginny mercifully came to them first, greeting Malfoy with careful warmth, then cooing over how beautifully Hermione was developing into motherhood.

"Are you going to do the Muggle test where they tell you if it's a boy or girl?" she asked.

Hermione shook her head. "Mum wants me to. But I'd like to think it hardly matters so, no."

Ginny nodded. "What about names then? That must be fun. What've you got so far?"

Hermione raised one hand, laughing. "Don't bring it up. Not unless you want to see Malfoy and me start the third wizarding war."

It was the wrong thing to say. Malfoy cringed the only way he knew how, openly. "I'm off to say hello to Madam Hooch," he said, retreating.

"Oh," Hermione called after him, still reaching for his arm as he walked away. "Don't - don't be too long, Malfoy."

Ginny snickered. "Still not on a first-name basis then?"

"I tried using 'Draco.' It's no good," Hermione said. "Those Malfoys and their names. I can tell you now that he wants to name my baby Perdita Thuban Malfoy."

Ginny shrieked over the chatter of the noisy hall. "Oh no. Why? You won't let him, will you?"

She rolled her eyes. "That's easier said than done. Sharing a human is a complicated negotiation. Just wait until Harry starts pressing you to name some hapless baby Albus. Trust me, it's coming."

Malfoy hadn't gone anywhere near Madam Hooch. Instead, he had veered into the men's toilets and was standing over the sinks, dabbing his face with a cold, wet paper towel. His cheeks and throat were flushed and he had no idea how to fix it. The more he thought about it, meddled with it, the worse it got.

His face was hidden behind the towel when footsteps sounded behind him, hard-soled shoes on the granite floor. There was Harry Potter, the best man, reflected in the mirror with him. His heart lurched with a sudden flashback to one of the worst days of sixth year at school - the two of them nearly killing each other in a flooding bathroom. Under the weight of their messy history, even greeting each other by name was complicated. "Harry" was too familiar, impossible. But "Potter" carried too much of the old, aggressive baggage. It wouldn't do.

Malfoy lifted his chin and said to the mirror, "Hey."

"Hey."

They looked at each other's reflections in the glass. Malfoy must have only imagined the burning in the scar on his chest. Stop. Hermione wanted this to work, and he had to learn to want what she wanted. He swallowed the lump in his throat, and said. "Lovely service."

Potter cleared his throat. "Yeah. Great - acoustics."

"Right." Malfoy turned away from the mirror. "Nice talking."

"She looks good," Potter blurted. "Happy, I mean."

"She looks nervous," Malfoy said.

"Well, she needn't be." Potter took a step toward him. "Everyone here wants nothing but the best for her, and her family."

Malfoy felt his face flushing again. Bloody Potter. Keep it together, Draco. He's not saying she needs their good wishes now that she's made the awful mistake of taking up with you. That's not what Potter said. It was simple, clumsy good will. Let it go. Breathe.

"Because through everything, all those years ago," Potter was still saying, "her family was what we thought about least of all. And we had no idea how it hurt her until St. Mungo's and Canada and - you. But she seems better now. She got the family she wanted, no thanks to us, and - well, thank you."

"Pleasure," Malfoy said, nearly smiling, nodding one last time, leaving to rejoin the reception before anything spoiled this.

Food and wine were being served and the dancing had started, providing a means for avoiding small-group small talk without seeming hostile. On the crowded dance floor, Malfoy and Hermione barely moved and hardly spoke as he replayed the conversation with Potter in his mind.

"You're smiling," she said. "What have you done?"

The smile vanished as Lavender and Ron jostled against them. "Oi, Malfoy," Ron said. "Have the honor of a dance with the bride, would you."

Lavender was smirking at him, pulling his elbow, lifting his hand away from Hermione's waist. "Come on, Draco," she said. "Let's leave them to it."

Ron mimed a small bow, extending his hand to Hermione. "Madam Malfoy?"

She took it. "Monsieur Lavender?"

"At your service."

She grinned but tensed when he touched her waist, so close to the baby.

Two glasses of wine ago, he might not have said, "Blimey, so you really are…"

"Yes, it'll be here by June."

"Wow."

"Yes, Ronald, wow. And congratulations to you as well."

"Thanks. Unbelievable she gave me a second chance, isn't it?"

They were dancing with each other, but not looking at each other. They watched their spouses instead. "Second chances," Hermione echoed. "It's maudlin but, yes, I hate to think where any of us would be without second chances."

Ron snorted. "What do you reckon the two of them are talking about?"

She laughed too. "Heaven knows. Poor darlings. Go on and trade me back."

"Alright then."

"Ron," she said as he steered her in the direction of Lavender's flowing white dress. "Thank you for inviting us. You will always be one of the best people I know. Thank you for inviting me to see you like this."

In the middle of his wedding dance floor, Ron Weasley was hugging her. "Nah, let me thank you," he said, "for fixing you, and fixing us in the nick of time."

He let her go, turning to Lavender and swallowing her in a snog, the dance floor roaring with cheers. The groom's public display of amicability toward his high-profile ex was readily adopted, with great relief, by the rest of the wedding guests. Hermione's presence here did not feel like it used to, but there was something wonderfully normal about being back in the company of the people who had raised her - teachers, old friends, Order of the Phoenix alumni, and the Weasley family themselves.

"How are you, Hermione?" Molly Weasley came to ask her, with the knowing edge of someone who had been through pregnancy herself. She eyed Hermione's figure. "You still don't have much in the way of bulk. Typical for the first go. How are you feeling, honestly?"

She was answering Mrs. Weasley's questions about the frequency of her trips to the toilet when her bracelet began to pulse against her wrist. Looking around the room, she couldn't see Malfoy anywhere.

No, not again. Not when everything was going so well.

She excused herself and let the growing strength of the signal in the bracelet lead her out of the hall and into the cold of the churchyard, across the street, and onto the green at the base of Rochester's old castle ruins.

"Malfoy?" she called into the dark garden.

"Here." He was behind her, sliding her coat over her shoulders, closing his arms around her and the baby.

"What's wrong? Why aren't you inside?"

"Nothing's wrong," he said, finally indulging in kissing her neck. "I was just thinking that I'd never properly enjoyed your skills in astronomy. And now here we are in this lovely open space, on a clear night in late winter - it's the perfect time for you to find Draco."

"Draco," she repeated, clearing her throat, raising her wand like a baton. "Here we have the Little Dipper, and there we have the Big Dipper, so coiled between and around them, is Draco."

He swayed against her. "Good girl."

She took his hand, settled it over the spot on her abdomen where she'd felt the baby move earlier. "One of its stars, that one," she went on, "it used to be the pole star. But then things changed. The earth moved, and now the true north star," she tracked through the sky with her wand, "is there."

"And look," he continued. "Look at the way Draco is tipped. Summer is coming, the season Draco spends upside down before righting itself again in the winter."

"Always righting itself," she said, looking over her shoulder at him as he cradled her from behind, kissing his cold cheek with warm lips. "How could I not love it?"

He hummed a laugh against her throat. "All these stars -- are they just for looking at to you? You with your scoffing at divination, with your animosity for a mother-author or anything that controls us against our will?"

"He asks as I stand here with an unplanned, unwilled pregnancy," she huffed.

His hand moved over her belly, beneath her coat on her satiny dress. The baby sensed it and shifted, too faintly for Draco to know it. He spoke into her ear. "The pregnancy isn't something that happened against our will. It just happened according to some better, finer will of ours, something that gave us what we wanted before we knew what exactly it was."

Again she kissed his face as he leaned over her shoulder -- his cheek and then his mouth, softly and sweetly, with just enough heat to banish all thought of going back to the wedding. She would take him home instead. But first, she said, "All these stars. If divination did work, there wouldn't be only one star dictating everything, like a single author. Even in the most ludicrous of astrologies, that's never how it works. Look at them, Malfoy. There are millions of stars, all of them part of our lives. If each one was an author of our story, there would have to be some that loved us enough to write us stories with an ending like this."

\------------------------------

Pollux Timothy Granger Malfoy was born exactly one week before the summer solstice, barely missing his father's birthday. He was a tiny boy with silky brown hair and grey eyes that darkened when he cried for his mother. She called him simply Poll, especially around his Muggle grandparents who spelled his name Paul.

When he was still newly born, Poll's parents took him to St. Mungo's Hospital to meet his other grandmother. She held him and smelled him and wept reverent tears over his perfect little form, as pure as anything she'd ever seen.

By the time this grandmother was discharged and allowed to return to life with her husband in Malfoy Manor, Poll and his parents lived in London in a flat of their own, closer to the laboratory where his parents had begun their research on magical intervention in memory.

Sometimes at night, his tummy would ache and his father would pace the floor with Poll's tiny body against his shoulder. He would have preferred to sleep in his parents' bed, between their bodies, every minute of every night. But Draco Malfoy's indulgence of his son ended where his wife began.

On one such night, he laid the baby in the cot, and got back into bed near dawn as grey light slowly suffused through the darkness. He could hear rain against the roof, and could see the contours of Hermione's face as she turned, murmuring, "Is he up again?"

"No, he's fine."

She nestled her face into his chest. "I can smell him on you. He's been up."

"He's sleeping now."

She moved even closer to him, and he took her in his arms in the warm pocket beneath the blankets. She called him Draco - it had been coming easier to her since the night they watched constellations in the Rochester park. "Happy anniversary, love," she said.

He smiled in the dimness. "Yes, it is."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sad this is over! Thanks for reading. I missed these two so much I wrote two one-shots and one long sequel about them. The shorts ones are "Amortentia at Home" and "Slythering Fairy Godmother" and the long one is "Always Something." It's set 17 years later, when their kids are teenagers. Look them up if you want more. Love, DDD

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, thank you for all the comments and kudos. I am binge-writing this fic and haven't been taking time away from that to answer everyone personally but I read and love all your feedback, even the more critical ones. It is all badly needed to keep my energy and pace up. Thank you!


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